The Noise Complaint

It’s clear to me: the NYC area is going to get hammered by the Covid virus again. There are just too many people out there pretending this thing isn’t real for it not to happen. After all this time, if you’re still pretending this thing isn’t real, there’s something really wrong with you. Whether it’s a profound disconnect from reality, some deep-seated prickishness or rank stupidity, I have no idea. These days, I’m going with “D. All of the Above.”

Something strange happened on Sunday with the schoolyard next door. I’ve written about it before a few times: a place of never-ending adolescence, be it actual adolescents, or grown men who never moved on to that next phase in life. Sunday was the first time I phoned in a noise complaint to 311 – after living here 34 years. I finally had it to the point where I wanted authorities involved.

I’ve even written about the Mexican soccer league back in 2010, roughly when they first started showing up at the schoolyard every Sunday. They’ve been a fixture since, save when temperatures sink into the 40s in winter. They have their own uniforms, their own refs, their own nets. They store the metal frames for their nets on the very edge of the landlord’s property. As the metal poles are wedged flat against a cement wall, it’s really not a problem. I’m surprised these things never get stolen.

They weren’t the first group to take over the schoolyard on Sundays. For a few years in the early 00s, there was a street hockey league that drove in from farther out on Long Island to use the schoolyard for 2-3 hours every fall. They were obnoxious. Loud, white, deeply suburban, acting like they owned the neighborhood and the people who lived here were irritating aberrations. How they got wind of the open space, I have no clue. Everyone in the neighborhood was relieved when they inexplicably stopped showing up one fall. Of course, within a year or two, the Mexican soccer league slowly eased into that space and made it their own on Sundays. Not just for a few hours, but all day.

Until recently, they weren’t coming in such large numbers. As the Covid restrictions came into play in mid-March, they had yet to start up playing soccer full-on again. They were surely not around in March or April. If they had shown up, they wouldn’t have been able to get in. The third week in March, the mayor ordered parks closed. Thus, extra chain-link fencing was wired into place covering the entrance of the park, and the basketball rims were taken off the backboards. This provided a good laugh to people in the neighborhood as doing so might have put out a dozen kids in the neighborhood who use the schoolyard for basketball (as opposed to the dozens of men in the Mexican soccer league). The fencing stayed in place until the first week of May when one day, it simply wasn’t there anymore.

The soccer league showed up shortly thereafter, long before the Covid restrictions were lifted in early June, i.e., in clear violation of the city’s law prohibiting public gatherings. In early June, a new limit for social gatherings was set at 10 people; the soccer league showed up with dozens of players. No one stopped them. I was not happy that they were showing up and playing but didn’t want to be “the bad guy” to bust them.

When they came back, it was just the guys playing and waiting to play. Over the past few months, things have eased back to normal, i.e., by early Sunday afternoon, there are anywhere from 150 to 200 people in that schoolyard. The players aren’t wearing masks. Some of the spectators are; most aren’t. No one is social distancing. To give you an idea of the size of the schoolyard, it contains one basketball court and about half of one football field.

As before, children are relieving themselves in the small patch of woods that run between the park and the row of houses with their backyards to the park. The park contains no public restrooms; it wasn’t built for gatherings this large. None of the parks around here are; you need to go down by the East River to Astoria Park to find that. These parks were built to serve local kids to walk to and play sports or games for an hour or two, then walk home. Not to host large all-day events requiring parking and sanitation facilities.

This isn’t a hard-edged crowd. There are a lot of wives and kids showing up, an afternoon out for the family, to watch Dad vainly try to prolong his adolescence. I think for this reason, people tend not to give them a hard time. None of them appear to live around here and are clearly driving in from other parts of the city and suburbs. By 10 a.m. on Sunday, cars are double parked all up and down the street in front of the park, for hours. I know there has been friction in the past with locals trying to get their cars out. As I don’t have a car, this hasn’t been an issue with me. If you’re the kind of person who likes to use his car on Sunday, as most people do, chances are you will be parking blocks from your home when you get back. (In all fairness, the neighborhood has gone insane with parking. It’s nearly impossible to park on Ditmars Boulevard, the main drag in the neighborhood, with all the restaurants taking dozens of parking spaces for their outdoor seating.)

The only problem I’ve had with the league is that some of the more moronic players will leave their garbage behind in the gutter on the sidewalk I’m responsible for cleaning: empty Corona cans and bottles, food bags and wrappers, the occasional used diaper. Honestly? Given the mass of people passing through here any given Sunday, the amount of garbage left behind is minimal. In their infinite wisdom, the sanitation department decided to take away the lone garbage can situated at the park entrance. These people are producing far more garbage than can be contained in one garbage can, and it’s usually piled up there in mounds of black garbage bags on Monday morning. (I assume they’re bringing their own bags.) The city and sanitation department appear to be oblivious of what goes on here on Sundays, despite a sanitation department truck routinely driving by the park in the afternoon.

What I’m detailing for you here is that while the Mexican soccer league on Sundays is a pain in the ass, it normally isn't that much of a problem. Do I wish they’d go somewhere else? Sure, everyone who lives around here does, especially if they own a car. It’s too many people crammed together in too small a space, in a park that was in no way designed to deal with this many people for that length of time. If you have plans on using the park with your kids on Sunday? Forget it – isn’t going to happen. While the park was created as an open space for locals to use for recreation, there are no locals there on Sunday.

This past Sunday, there was a new twist. Around 10:00 a.m., I noticed a man’s voice booming from a sound system, in Spanish, coming from the park, along with some very loud music, some type of Latin pop with heavy bass. Someone had clearly set up a small P.A. system with a microphone, and this guy was carrying on about every 2-5 minutes. He sounded like a party D.J. I’ve lived here since 1999 and had never heard anything like this before. This was loud. Living in a basement apartment, I wasn’t getting the full brunt. When I went up to the landlord’s apartment, I couldn’t believe how loud this was. You couldn’t carry on a normal conversation without hearing this guy’s voice louder than the person speaking in the room. Coming back from the supermarket later in the day, I could clearly hear him from the other side of the public school about 300 yards away.

That’s when I called 311 to file a noise complaint. Frankly, I was pissed. Sunday morning? This disruptive level of noise? Along with the routine nonsense people around here tolerate with the schoolyard? No. Enough. Rule #1 of assholery in New York City: if you let people get away with questionable behavior once, they will take the lack of opposition as silent consent and keep doing it.

The police didn’t respond for hours, which made sense. Noise complaints must be last on their list of things to do on any given shift. Eventually, the cop who got me on my phone told me he was in front of the park, and these people had the right to be in the park until 10:00 p.m. that night. (He was wrong. The sign on the front of the park clearly states no one is permitted in the park after 9:00 p.m.)

He was looking at a street lined with at least 20 double-parked cars, from one end of the block to the other. He was also looking at a gathering of 200+ people in a cramped schoolyard, with many of those people not masked and none of them socially distanced. (If I’m not mistaken, the current law in New York City is that public gatherings of up to 50 are allowed. What’s going on every Sunday in the schoolyard is clearly illegal, but I’ve routinely seen gatherings this large, mostly informal sporting events in Astoria Park, over the past few months with no police intervention.) If I was a cop, I’d understand immediately that everything I was looking at before responding to a relatively minor noise complaint was wrong here.

Now, I would also gather the cops have fielded many complaints over the Sunday Mexican soccer league in the schoolyard in the past, be it parking, or what have you. I know an elderly Italian woman who lived across the street and died a few years ago, was out of her mind that kids were pissing and shitting in the woods by the park. (She would tell me as much whenever she accosted me while I was sweeping the sidewalk.) The cops want to avoid a hassle. I understand them not busting people double-parking, or they’d be doing that alone the rest of the afternoon. Breaking up a public gathering of that size would be difficult. If they were dedicated police officers, they would do something about it. But given the last few months of protests and such, most cops aren’t going to be that diligent. For all I know, they might be instructed not to disturb large gatherings like this.

What the cop said next startled me: “Buddy, this really isn’t that loud.”

This was while the guy on the P.A. system was blasting away. I could barely hear the cop speaking on the phone with the background noise. To not think this was loud, you would have to live between an airport and a drag racing track. He reiterated, “These people have every right …”

I cut him off: “I’m not debating their right to be in the park. But someone operating a P.A. system in a public park surrounded by residential housing is something I’ve never heard living here over 20 years. This can’t be legal?”

He paused, asked his partner a question, then came back: “Yes, it is.”

The sign by the entrance to the park states clearly that there is no “loud music” playing allowed, a rule which is broken daily. This was way beyond that, a man with a P.A. system shouting at the neighborhood for hours and blocks around the park, with music blasting behind him. At this point, I figured, “This cop just doesn’t want to deal with this.”

He finally sighed and said, “Look, we’ll tell him to turn it down, but understand these people have the right to be in the park …”

His insistence on repeating that line let me know this was far from the first time he was dealing with complaints about the park. It also let me know that whatever residual guilt I was feeling over filing the complaint was for naught – the soccer league wasn’t going anywhere. While I wasn’t calling to complain about a violation of the city’s pandemic laws, he let me know even if I had, there was no way he was going to enforce those laws. When a cop tells you a clearly illegal gathering is legal, the best thing to do is quietly concede the point. Because there is a disconnect with reality that makes no sense.

To his credit, he did what he was asked to do. Minutes later, there was no more guy carrying on through a P.A. system. He didn’t just turn it down – he shut it off, for which I was grateful. That said, I still heard people carrying on in the park from around 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm, purposely making too much noise to be defiant by that point. They had no idea blasting a boombox, screaming and whistling put out a minute fraction of the decibel level of a P.A. system. I also did some quick research to find Mexican Independence Day was this past Wednesday, so I gather this might be related to that. This Washington Post article implies that the holiday for people in Mexico was somber and reflective due to the pandemic. Well, not in the schoolyard on Sunday. I suspect if that reporter had sauntered off to the poor neighborhoods, he would have found people partying in the streets, but noting as much wouldn’t have served his political agenda. (Maybe this was the Mexican version of Trump’s Fourth of July blowout in South Dakota?)

The soccer league showing up on Sundays is made up of simple working people trying to make it in a foreign land, and this is their day out. Under normal circumstances, I’m OK with them being there and playing as long as they want, despite the issues I noted. During a pandemic? Something isn’t working here in ways that suggest a systematic refusal to acknowledge the virus. There seems to be an understanding among all parties that these people gathering in the schoolyard are somehow lesser and not held accountable for their actions, and they in turn seem to have placed less value on their lives. Which, in turn, places less value on everyone else’s lives. This is how a pandemic thrives. Like plugging a microphone into a P.A. system and blasting everyone within earshot. Forgive me for not wanting to listen.