Give Me a Donut and a Cop, Pronto!

“Can I interest you in some pastry items?”
This was the opening line of the community police meetings in Park Slope that I attended as a youngish reporter. Never failed. Once everyone was seated in their pews, a chubby cop with a tight shirt and small, fat hands would offer up the “pastry items.” And every time it made me smile because the pastry items were just a bunch of donuts in a box. Not even Dunkin Donuts. No, these were bought at the local grocery store.
The meetings were at times stultifying and revelatory. Mostly, the complaints dealt with noise. And it being Park Slope other less stultifying complaints dealt with racism and crime. And I would have to then go back to the offices of the papers I worked for, where I barely made any money and got absolutely no respect. I then stayed up late and wrote at least two stories from these meetings and eventually I got fired. But that's another story for another time.
Back to the noise...The noise complaints used to make me cringe. It’s New York City, I thought. So what if a truck rolls by once in a while and makes your brownstone shake? What do you expect? A new bar opens on your street, there will be noise, you crazy old people. Construction down the road? Live with it! Or move to the ‘burbs. Or move in with your children who you say are so wonderful. Go away.

So at each meeting, a worn out, blurry-eyed old school Park Slopian would stand up and yell at the fat policeman and ask him what they are going to do about the noise. Then the fat policeman would show them the fancy noise meters they carry around to figure out the levels of noise coming from a car’s boom box or a neighbor’s loud stereo. The technology always calmed the crowd down. Once people saw the noise meter they thought, “Oh, look new technology. The cops are doing something now!”
This morning, in my lovely neighborhood, a pile driver started thumping, pumping, drumming at exactly 7:15am. It didn’t stop. I left my house at 9:15 and still it thumped and pumped and gave us headaches.
So, at the next Williamsburg/Greenpoint community police meeting, it will be me sitting there, eating some “pastry items” and yelling at a fat cop. It’s all we have left in this time in Williamsburg. We are the Park Slope of the mid-90s. I figured it out, got old and got irritated. But no noise meter is going to make me quiet.
There are no real grocery stores in my neighborhood, but there are large, ugly, glass condos being constructed all around me. There are fat men leering at me on my walk to the subway who operate the loud pile drivers that leave me and my lovely neighbors angry all day, without our beauty sleep, awakened by noise pollution due to “progress” and the building of expensive hovels where yuppies will live. As I lay awake contemplating the thumping pile driver and shutting my windows and closing any doors that lead to the noise, I also thought that maybe these huge buildings that are kicking up dust around my building, waking me up and making my walk to the subway annoying, may just stay unoccupied. Who is really going to move in? There’s enough space for thousands of people, just in my little corner of the world with five new big buildings being propped up. No one is going to move into these buildings. No one.
But I am one of the lonely, the screwed. The rent stabilized tenants of the city whose last resort consists of heading to the community board meeting and bitching and ranting but not being heard. Maybe some young reporter will be bored by me, too.
Ahh, such a cycle in life, isn’t there?

On a completely unrelated note. A shout out to the lovely Maddy Sauer who brilliantly broke the Foley story for the mouse. Hurrah…

Comments

[Judy]

It's 12:15 and the piledriver is still in full effect. A jackhammer has been added in the last half hour or so too. It's quite the cacophany.

I love how they classify us as an industrial neighborhood even though there are far more condos than factories at this point. I also question who the hell is going to fill all these apartments. Surely there aren't that many people with a taste for overpriced sheetrock constructions. Even if they do overlook that fugly-ass excuse for a park. Granny will be joining you at that meeting and she'll be wearing her crankypants!

[willow]

you gotta call 311 on that shit. I'm pretty sure that they can't start construction until 8am.
I feel your pain. Con Ed is digging up the street. And we have a gut renovation going on 4 doors down. Three weeks in a row they emptied the humungous dumpster on the street at 3am on a Tuesday.

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