Partygoers in the East Village and Lower East Side are making the biggest racket in town – with bars and clubs in those communities generating the most noise complaints in the city, latest figures show.
Between July 1, 2007, and Jan. 31, 2008, Community Board 3 – which covers the two youth-dominated neighborhoods, as well as Chinatown – recorded 1,872 complaints about the pounding din coming from nightspots.
That represented 26 percent of the 7,157 complaints for bars, clubs and restaurants in Manhattan.
Some longtime residents say the situation has become so bad that they long for the pre-gentrification days, when large swaths of the Lower East Side were a no-man’s land.
“At least with the drug dealers there wasn’t any noise,” said Frances Ayers, 47, who lives at Rivington and Ludlow streets.
In total, CB 3 registered 6,133 noise complaints – which also included gripes over construction racket, loud neighbors, car alarms and other street noise – during the seven-month stretch. That’s second only to CB 12, which covers a much larger geographical area that includes Washington Heights.
Susan Stetzer, CB 3’s district manager, placed much of the blame on the ruckus created when clubs and bars start emptying out in the predawn hours.
She said horn-honking cabbies jostling for fares outside clubs between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. are generating “terrible complaints” since “you can hear them from blocks and blocks away.”
But cops can’t hand out summonses unless they are present when the violation occurs.
Fines are hefty: from $2,000, to $24,000 for third offenses. But businesses that take steps to mitigate noise can escape with a warning the first time.
The neighborhood with the second-highest number of noise complaints from bars and clubs was the West Village, with 1,268 – about 50 percent less than its upstart neighbor.
Across the river in Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s growing hip set was responsible for 1,072 noise complaints about bars and clubs, third most in the city.
City Councilman David Yassky (D-Brooklyn), whose district includes the booming neighborhood, said his office actually gets a lot more calls about construction noise.
Indeed, records show CB 1, covering Williamsburg, had the most construction-noise complaints of any Brooklyn community during the period, with 698.
The Upper West Side’s Community Board 7 had the most construction-noise complaints citywide, 1,937.
“We have about 23 active construction sites right now, and we have a lot of rock chopping going on,” explained Penny Ryan, the board’s district manager.
A Post reporter who visited the area with a hand-held sound meter at 3:30 p.m. on Friday measured a peak of 84.98 decibels and a low of 66.5. The American Language Hearing Association considers noise over 80 “potentially hazardous.”
The sound levels permitted under the noise code can vary widely. But except for the use of emergency sirens, there’s no activity for which 80 decibels are acceptable.
Calls to 311 about noise reached 237,994 in the seven months after a new code was introduced, up nearly 8 percent over the 221,524 that came in during the previous equivalent period.
Of the 59 community-board districts, only three outside Manhattan made the Top 10 list for overall noise complaints – Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Fordham in The Bronx.
Additional reporting by Leonardo Blair, Tatiana Deligiannakis and Rebecca Rosenberg