Lots of noise about noise at Duane town hall meeting
By Lawrence Lerner
Just how noisy is it in Chelsea these days?
According to many of the 100 people packed into the Hudson Guild’s Dan Carpenter Room for a town hall meeting on Chelsea nightlife on Monday, the neighborhood is plenty noisy, especially near the clubs in West Chelsea from the ungodly hours of midnight to 4 a.m.
Noise and other quality-of-life issues such as traffic, parking and trash were the focus of the sometimes fractious two-hour meeting, which was organized by State Senator Tom Duane and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and featured an exhaustive panel that included elected officials, association heads and representatives from a host of state and city agencies.
Community Board 4 Chairperson Lee Compton began the meeting with a brief Powerpoint presentation outlining recent developments and improvements in the West Chelsea nightlife scene, as well as a future course of action recommended by the board.
“Our problems are not with the clubs themselves, but with the interface between clubs and the community,” he said.
Compton then gave a five-year history of zoning and development in the area and explained how the community board was taken by surprise by the oversaturation of clubs in West Chelsea.
“In 2001, we had a license and operating capacity of 1,000 [people],” he said. “In 2003, license capacity shot up to 8,000, while operating capacity rose only to 3,000. At that point, we were not yet seeing the effects of the licenses being granted. I’ve heard from many, ‘Didn’t you see this coming?’ Well, I know of only one person who knew what was coming.”
The oversaturation is largely credited for making life miserable for many West Chelsea residents.
According to Captain Stephen Hughes of the 10th Precinct, who followed Compton’s presentation, four out of New York City’s five largest clubs are in Chelsea. The total capacity of the area’s clubs is 18,000 people, with the five newest accounting for 11,000.
“Assaults in the precinct are up some 42 percent from last year, mainly due to the clubs,” he said.
The panelists who followed Hughes continued with brief presentations before handing the reins back to Duane, who initiated a Q & A session with the audience that took up three-quarters of what Duane called “very much a working meeting.” Audience members wrote their queries on index cards, which were read by Duane and addressed to the panel.
The first four out of a total of 14 questions focused directly on noise, while discussions ensuing from many of the other questions touched on the issue tangentially.
The first questioner wanted to know whether there are volume standards in New York City. The second question read: “What can be done to stop the late-night screaming on the street?” which prompted a far-reaching discussion that involved four panelists plus Duane. The third questioner wondered whether the police currently hand out noise violations for moving vehicles. And the fourth asked, “Can you please do something about the revving motorcycles and cars without mufflers?”
Several of the panelists, including Assemblymember Richard Gottfried and New York Nightlife Association President David Rabin, called for the Police Department to implement paid detail for clubs in the area, which would involve off-duty officers in uniform patrolling outside clubs and would be paid for by a fund set up by club owners.
“Paid detail is an outgrowth of our being rebuffed earlier on when we asked for more police,” said Rabin. “The average patron is much more likely to quiet down if they see police around.”
Rabin added that the noise problem is exacerbated not only by the mayor’s smoking ban but by the perennial tension between club owners and police.
“People who come up to a club door drunk and are rejected then proceed to yell at the bouncer. It happens all the time,” he said. “Problem is, if a club calls the police, it will get a ‘failure to control premise’ violation. Why would we call in that situation? We’re trying, but we don’t know what to do.”
State Liquor Authority C.E.O. Joshua Toas sympathized with Rabin.
“Club owners are not always responsible for what happens inside or outside clubs,” Toas said. “We would like to see a situation where club owners are more likely to get a violation for not calling the police than for calling. The S.L.A. is not looking to close clubs.”
Borough President Stringer also weighed in on club-police relations.
“Is it reasonable to create a protocol for club owners to call the police?” he asked. “I’ve seen bodies dumped outside clubs until an ambulance gets there,” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless clubs and police work together.”
The conversation then veered toward another issue central to the noise problem in West Chelsea: taxis clogging up the lanes on Tenth Ave.
“The honking that you hear along Tenth Ave. late at night comes mostly from when cabs pick up or drop off patrons in the middle of Tenth Ave. and cause traffic congestion,” said Samara Epstein, director of constituent affairs for the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. “We, along with Community Board 4, are looking into how to alleviate that,” she said.
Several audience members insisted that changing the direction of traffic on 27th St. between 10th and 11th Aves. might also help alleviate the congestion and noise, since that will force taxis to migrate down the less residential 11th Ave. onto 27th St., rather than cue up on an already crowded 10th Ave.
Rabin also suggested a change in regional public transportation could help with the congestion and noise.
“When M.T.A. and New Jersey Transit run late-night trains — past the current 1 a.m. — we could substantially reduce the number of cars and drunk drivers coming into the city for the club scene. That is crucial to the discussion,” he said.
The remainder of the Q & A session, which prompted equally impassioned discussion, looked at issues like parking, fake I.D.’s, state licensing procedures, trash pickup, cabaret licenses and stricter penalties for misrepresentation on club license applications.
The town hall came on the heels of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s New York City Nightlife Safety Summit last month, which brought community groups, law enforcement, the nightlife industry, government agencies and elected officials together at John Jay College to devise solutions to nightlife safety issues.
It was the third such meeting that Duane has held in neighborhoods affected by the recent influx of the nightlife. The others were held in the West Village in December 2004 and the Lower East Side in July 2005.
