On ‘Noisy’ Neighborhoods
Boehme defines the concept of urban atmosphere as “an attempt to identify something characteristic about a city” (Boehme, p. 46). Many factors make up a neighborhood’s atmosphere: aesthetics, sound, emotional connection, memory, just to name a few. Yet, a key component could also be how a neighborhood is perceived. Is it seen as safe or dangerous? Calm or chaotic? Cool or uncool? And more importantly, how do these perceptions come about, and how are they shaped in the public discourse? It is precisely these questions that I am most interested in looking at through this piece.
I live near a crossing of Lower Manhattan often nicknamed Hell Square by locals and the press. This tiny two-block radius has one of the highest concentrations of late-night bars in New York City. During the day, this part of the neighborhood is quiet and sleepy. The streets are largely empty except for the occasional group of tourists and people lining up to purchase vintage shoes. Given that most of the local businesses are bars, they are closed during the day. At night, the streets become crowded with double-parked cars and large groups of young people lining up for the bars and nightclubs. Alongside the partiers are large numbers of police patrolling the area. Public drinking and bar fights outside of the nightclubs are a common sight on Saturday nights. The neighborhood is loud outside, but the pre-war tenement apartments that line its streets are effective at keeping most of the sound out.
This place is often perceived as having a negative atmosphere, as demonstrated by its press-coined nickname. Yet, if we want to find methodologies to understand the root of these perceptions, it is necessary not just to gather data, but to also look at existing information such as public data on factors like 311 complaints, as well as the information we can glean from looking at media narratives on the neighborhood via the coding of news articles, posts on Nextdoor, etc. 311 data, as shown in Figure 1 shows that most police complaints for the relevant Zip Code are overwhelmingly noise-related, or heavily related to loudness. Likewise, if we look at what is being written about my street, one can find the use of terms like “blight,” “mobs,” and “lawlessness.” The neighborhood itself is referred to using terms like “hotbed of crime” and a “vomit nexus.”
Yet, Gandy argues that when looking at the urban atmosphere of a place, “we must contend not just with the aesthetic characteristics of space but with a welter of historically constituted cultural and socio- technological constellations” (Gandy, p. 365). Why is this tiny part of the Lower East Side despised in the minds of certain corners of the local press and by some local residents? Its derision in some corners brings to mind questions of class and habitus. The issue of noise and rowdiness is often used to mark a distinction between the more affluent neighborhood residents and owners of upscale businesses leading the anti-”Hell Square” charge and the working-class, and largely Black, youths from New Jersey and the outer boroughs who come to these bars to party.
Likewise, there is a narrative of fear and moral panic being propagated through the “Hell Square” term. For Sandercock, this fear informs how many think about the built environment. She argues that it is “at the core of how most people think about the physical design of public space” (Sandercock, p. 219). This is reinforced by the sheer numbers of police who come to patrol the area on weekends, which also reflects a sense of enforced class and racial habitus. The police patrolling the streets appear to have different levels of tolerance for Whites versus non-Whites and based on the level of perceived affluence. White NYU students are mostly left alone, whereas ethnic minorities and those perceived as more working class get far worse treatment.
In more specific terms, I have often wondered if the outrage over the party crowd in the neighborhood is more about enforcing a business-friendly upper-middle class habitus in this part of Manhattan or whether it stems from legitimate concerns over the quality of life here. To what extent are the community groups mobilizing against “Hell Square” wishing to establish spatial segregation and deprive the ‘other’ of a right to the city? Do the partiers here represent a form of spatial tactics of resistance against the non-place that is an increasingly exclusionary and corporatized Manhattan? These are questions that remain open while looking at this space, all of which merit further research.
Bibliography
Böhme, Gernot. 2014. “Urban Atmospheres: Charting New Directions for Architecture and Urban Planning.” In Architectural Atmospheres, 42–59. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER.
Gandy, Matthew. 2017. “Urban Atmospheres.” Cultural Geographies 24 (3): 353–74.
Sandercock, Leonie. 2017. Difference, fear and habitus: A political economy of urban fears. In Habitus: A sense of place, 235–50 Routledge.
