Over at the Examiner, Sabrina Brody, the LA Celebrity Headlines Examiner, writes about Madonna's sue-happy neighbors upset about the noise coming from the star's NYC apartment. And then! the story goes here:
[I]t could be the general irritating whiny new fad that's started since New York City's gentrification rate skyrocketed. All these people moving to Alphabet City and the Lower East Side who proceed to complain that the notoriously grungy, loud neighborhood is grungy and loud. Hey, it's a city! A pretty tight city. The noise is part of the rush. YOU LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY.
Hmm, well, there's noise and then there's Madonna and her entourage doing their rendition of Stomp on the ceiling for hours on end.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed, though, with a recent influx of new tenants in my building, that the complaints have increased. Newer tenants seem to be whining at every inconvenience, expecting a 150-year old building to function as perfectly as one built 5 years ago. Old plumbing breaks, old wiring deteriorates, old locks jam, old mortar crumbles...these things happen and they get repaired, but I feel I'm suddenly surrounded by people who have never learned to boil water for themselves.
Or, maybe it's me just getting old and complacent. When I think about how bad the area was when I moved in, these little problems really don't seem important enough to throw a tantrum.
Most of the new tenants I see are the ones making the noise, of course.
ReplyDeleteBut you make a good point, Goggla. New tenants expecting too much... and fogies like me getting too complacent with inefficiencies... "The front door is broken, eh, I remember when we didn't have a front door..."
Ah, yes, the front door knob used to come off in my hand all the time (making Monday mornings extra super). When using a key from the outside, the knob on the inside would get pushed out, which meant punching in the pane of plexiglass, stepping through, and pounding the plexiglass back into the frame. This worked fine assuming you weren't in a hurry to get away from the serial killer who'd chased you home...
ReplyDeletemars bar customer.....least when she lived here and when she's in town. connections!
ReplyDeleteSilly me, all I remember is the violence and poverty of the neighborhood. Al of you seem to remember a Utopia that was never there.
ReplyDeletePeople like Sabrina portray the "old" New York as one in which everyone embraced the noise, the dirt and the crime. Of course, this misconception was formed by decades of learning about New York from the movies.
ReplyDeletePSA: New York residents always hated this shit, but in the old days, they had nobody to whom they could complain except for the perpetrators, who would most likely mug, stab, shoot or rape them.
I do agree that a certain level of noise and filth is part of NYC life - the suburban calm creeps me out. But sirens, the occasional braying laughter or troupe of miscreants marching home singing some drunken ditty is fine. The retarded ramblings of thousands of morons loitering for hours outside of a bar (or, worse yet, in a rooftop bar) screaming into their cellphones about their dehydrated inner labial condition or how Biff the Goldman Boy dumped them for a MILF from Schenectady... oh, just SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.