City Noise Might Be Making You Sick
Julia Barnett Rice
Concerns about hearing loss largely focus on excessive noise exposure. But environmental noise is just as unsafe. People living in cities are regularly exposed (against their will) to noise above 85 decibels from sources like traffic  subways  industrial activity  and airports. That’s enough to cause significant hearing loss over time. If you have an hour-long commute at such sound levels  your hearing has probably already been affected. Urban life also sustains average background noise levels of 60 decibels  which is loud enough to raise one’s blood pressure and heart rate  and cause stress  loss of concentration  and loss of sleep. Sirens are a particularly extreme example of the kind of noise inflicted on people every day: They ring at a sound-pressure level of 120 decibels —a level that corresponds with the human pain threshold  according to the World Health Organization. But since the turn of the 20th century  protecting human hearing has taken a back seat to securing quiet for those with means  and punishing those without. Noise-abatement laws transformed an objective concern about environmental and health conditions into a subjective fight over aesthetic moralism. One of the earliest urban anti-noise campaigns was initiated by  Julia Barnett Rice   the wealthy  well-educated wife of a businessman and publisher. The sound of tugboat horns was causing  Rice  great annoyance as  she  tried to relax in  her  ornate Italianate mansion. But  she  knew that this appeal would fall on deaf ears  so to speak. So  she  decided to use the poor and sick people languishing in urban hospitals as a scapegoat. Isaac Rice  her husband and the publisher of The Forum  became a champion of his wife’s crusade. In 1906  he published  her  piece  “An Effort to Suppress Noise ” which amounts to a call for class antagonism.  She  begins by channeling the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer  who likens noise to boorishness: There are people  it is true—nay  a great many people—who smile at such [sounds]  because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument  or thought  or poetry  or art; in a word  to any kind of intellectual influence. Who are these insipid people in  Rice ’s narrative? The tugboat workers. The piece recounts  Rice ’s efforts to ban excessive whistling from aboard their vessels.  Rice  portrays  herself  as a dogged crusader  pleading for quietude amidst unrelenting clamor.
First   she  sought aid from the law. In the New York City Collector’s Office Law Division   she  discovered a clause that “seems to vest in the Local Board of Steamboat Inspectors all necessary powers to punish ... any act on the part of a licensed officer that they adjudge to be ‘misconduct’ or ‘negligence’ or ‘unskillfulness.’” In other words   Rice  attempted to present the call of tugboat horns as professional misconduct. Alas for  her   the U.S. Local Steamboat Inspectors decided that “the point was not well taken.”  Rice  then went to the police to start a petition drive.  She  promised signatures from “poor and rich alike ” but sent establishment personalities to collect them. Among the endorsees were wealthy hospital superintendents  who lent credence to  Rice ’s claims to help the sick rather than to punish marine workers. The inspectors were still unmoved. When  Rice  finally interviewed some of the tugboat workers   she  presented their responses as evidence of wrongdoing rather than as the accounts of workingmen describing their labor. The tugboat captains offered reasonable rationales for sounding whistles. One explained that removing the whistles “would necessitate an extra deckhand to act as messenger to notify the pier hands  besides all the time that would be lost.” Another stated  “We run a risk of losing a whole tide if we do not rouse the crew on the barge.” And yet another  “You must whistle to wake up the crew  which you cannot expect to stay on watch day and night.”
 Rice  did not relent.  She  went to maritime academics and higher-ups  who endorsed  her  and researched  her  claim. At last   she  won a victory: The National Board of Steam Navigation passed a resolution prohibiting unnecessary whistle-blowing. The tugboat workers adhered for a day or two  and then  finding that work became impossible and that the National Board had no way of enforcing the resolution  returned to using the horns as often as they liked.  Rice  had had enough.  She  proposed a law restricting all but a few scenarios in which tugboats can use their whistles  and demanded a standing representative in the Department of Commerce and Labor who would police the waterways for nuisance. In this effort  too   she  came away empty-handed. Finally  in one last-ditch effort   Rice  found success. At a meeting of about 10 000 representatives from the transportation industry  the American Association of Masters  Mates  and Pilots passed a resolution ending the use of “indiscriminate and  above all  noisy signaling.” The law was replicated at the federal level under the 1907 Bennet Act  the first anti-noise bill ratified by Congress.  Rice ’s use of the poor and the sick as a tool to pass  her  legislation played little part in why the authorities finally listened. Researchers had found that the signaling was impacting tugboat navigation  making entering and exiting the harbor confusing and unsafe at night.
Throughout  Rice ’s entire ordeal   she  presented the tugboat workers as personal enemies rather than potential allies.  Her  plight for quiet was a moral one; as  she  saw it  the peace had been stolen from  her  by the mariners. Looking back   she  comes off as vindictive and elitist. But unfortunately   her  belligerent approach set the stage for subsequent noise-abatement campaigns in cities around the country. As the historian Emily Thompson explains in her book The Soundscape of Modernity  noise-abatement laws singled out relatively powerless people  those who were seen to impede “the middle-class vision of a well-ordered city.” Among these was the 1908 General Order 47  issued by New York City Police Commissioner Thomas Bingham. It targeted street ruckus rather than port noise: commotion from street vendors  newsboys  tin-can kickers  roller skaters  street musicians  automobile horns  flat-wheeled streetcars  and more. Soon after  laws that banned occupational noises  preventing people from working for a living in order to protect the quietude  appeared in Boston; Little Rock  Arkansas; San Francisco; and elsewhere. These fights hit street workers  most of whom were immigrants  hard. Still  the courts upheld the laws. One infamous incident involved a Chicago ordinance that limited peddlers to certain parts of the city and banned them from advertising using shouting. When the courts upheld this law in 1911  the peddlers first went on strike  and then rioted  causing a mass uprising and widespread damages. The police punished the peddlers  the strike was broken  and the law remained on the books. Soon there were no more vendors walking the streets. By the 1920s and ’30s  noise law after noise law helped clear the urban street. Eventually  it ceased to be the domain of people and was overtaken instead by cars—which created their own noise  of course.
Noise laws also played a key role in the development and implementation of zoning  the separating of a city’s parcels of land into “zones” for which a specific purpose (such as residential  commercial  or industrial) is assigned. A lasting legacy of  Rice ’s tugboat campaign was the concept of “quiet zones”—places where noisemaking was especially prohibited because of its potential harm  such as around hospitals  schools  and the houses of the sick. New York set up its first quiet zones in 1908  aided by  Rice ’s work in talking to hospital administrators  and other cities followed soon after. Violating a quiet zone usually constituted a misdemeanor offense  punishable by fine  imprisonment  or both. Enforcing anti-noise ordinances troubled legislators at both the local and national levels  especially when the perpetrator of a noise was an industry vital to a city  a conflict that persists to this day. Interfering with commerce in order to protect silence was perfectly acceptable when it limited barkers  peddlers  or other individuals with little power. But when it came to manufacturers  factories  or the transporters of goods  the risk of disturbing commerce outweighed the benefits to the peace. Also  since noise and its treatment in the law was subjective  anti-noise legislation was often ineffective. Police in urban areas had much more pressing issues at hand anyway. However  the idea of “quiet zones” persisted in urban planning. The first zoning laws took noise into account  designating residential zones in places separate from commerce and industry. Like noise-abatement laws  zoning was also built on a foundation of inequality. One of its earliest uses created boundaries separating black and white families  a practice that persisted even after the Supreme Court struck it down in 1917. Middle-class whites looking to prevent lower-income nonwhites (and to some extent lower-income whites as well) from infiltrating their neighborhoods had to come up with a different legal solution.
Today  as suburbanites return to cities  they bring the fight for quiet along with them. To gentrify a neighborhood also involves quieting it down. The desire for sonic control in and around the home is prioritized above the social fabric of the city  a practice exemplified by the targeting of arts and music venues that are cited as being partially responsible for neighborhood revival in the first place. In her book Beyond Unwanted Sound  Marie Thompson describes an example from the industrial area of Ouseburn Valley in the United Kingdom. The region had become a hotbed of music and the arts partly because there were few residences to disturb. Eventually  several venues closed after repeated run-ins with the law due to noise complaints. These complaints came not from concerned locals  but from wealthy newcomers buying into new developments built explicitly to capitalize on the area’s vibrant nightlife. The noise that does the most harm doesn’t come from clubs and house parties—the causes of many garden-variety noise complaints and violations. Ironically   Rice  did get something right in  her  crusade: Industrial noise poses the worst problem  although individual workers were not to blame for it  as  Rice  had also concluded. The two largest sources of environmental noise are transportation and industrial activity. The cars for which early noise ordinances helped clear the streets have amplified that noise to a universal  inescapable level. Industrial areas  often designated for land close to the poorest nonwhite areas in a city  are even worse.
To solve the environmental-noise problem  cities and their citizens should learn from the mistakes of the past. Targeting the noise of individuals is ineffective  antisocial  and fails to eradicate the noise that really hurts people: environmental noise. Solutions to that problem must be systemic  requiring a large-scale  collective response across many different targets. Despite her intentions  Julia Barnett Rice offers a model. She arrived at success only once she began addressing the marine industry at large. Similar approaches can work today. Instead of punishing individual transportation workers whose trucks may be too old  a more comprehensive solution could target the Department of Transportation  with demands to repave worn roads with the porous asphalt configurations used in Europe to reduce tire noise. Likewise  any move toward using renewable energy sources will result in a quieter environment  as coal and oil extraction are extremely noisy labors. At the local and state level  demanding funding for repairs and improvement to outdated transit infrastructure will greatly reduce the noise caused by trains  cars  and trucks. Urban-planning approaches to eliminating noise on a city-by-city basis can be as simple as taking a single lane away from cars and giving it to bicycles  people  or green space. Improving  expanding  and properly funding public transit removes cars from the road  both reducing the sound they produce and replacing it with quieter options like trams and high-speed light-rail. In architecture  acoustics should play a greater role in all structures  from mundane apartment buildings to the grandest art museums. Noise control should be a consideration from the very first planning stage  rather than tacked on as an afterthought.
Concerns about hearing loss largely focus on excessive noise exposure. But environmental noise is just as unsafe. People living in cities are regularly exposed (against their will) to noise above 85 decibels from sources like traffic  subways  industrial activity  and airports. That’s enough to cause significant hearing loss over time. If you have an hour-long commute at such sound levels  your hearing has probably already been affected. Urban life also sustains average background noise levels of 60 decibels  which is loud enough to raise one’s blood pressure and heart rate  and cause stress  loss of concentration  and loss of sleep. Sirens are a particularly extreme example of the kind of noise inflicted on people every day: They ring at a sound-pressure level of 120 decibels —a level that corresponds with the human pain threshold  according to the World Health Organization. But since the turn of the 20th century  protecting human hearing has taken a back seat to securing quiet for those with means  and punishing those without. Noise-abatement laws transformed an objective concern about environmental and health conditions into a subjective fight over aesthetic moralism. One of the earliest urban anti-noise campaigns was initiated by  Julia Barnett Rice   the wealthy  well-educated wife of a businessman and publisher. The sound of tugboat horns was causing  Rice  great annoyance as  she  tried to relax in  her  ornate Italianate mansion. But  she  knew that this appeal would fall on deaf ears  so to speak. So  she  decided to use the poor and sick people languishing in urban hospitals as a scapegoat. Isaac Rice  her husband and the publisher of The Forum  became a champion of his wife’s crusade. In 1906  he published  her  piece  “An Effort to Suppress Noise ” which amounts to a call for class antagonism.  She  begins by channeling the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer  who likens noise to boorishness: There are people  it is true—nay  a great many people—who smile at such [sounds]  because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument  or thought  or poetry  or art; in a word  to any kind of intellectual influence. Who are these insipid people in  Rice ’s narrative? The tugboat workers. The piece recounts  [TGT] ’s efforts to ban excessive whistling from aboard their vessels.  [TGT]portrays  [TGT]  as a dogged crusader  pleading for quietude amidst unrelenting clamor.
First   [TGT]  sought aid from the law. In the New York City Collector’s Office Law Division   [TGT]  discovered a clause that “seems to vest in the Local Board of Steamboat Inspectors all necessary powers to punish ... any act on the part of a licensed officer that they adjudge to be ‘misconduct’ or ‘negligence’ or ‘unskillfulness.’” In other words   [TGT]attempted to present the call of tugboat horns as professional misconduct. Alas for  her   the U.S. Local Steamboat Inspectors decided that “the point was not well taken.”  [TGT]then went to the police to start a petition drive.  [TGT]  promised signatures from “poor and rich alike ” but sent establishment personalities to collect them. Among the endorsees were wealthy hospital superintendents  who lent credence to  [TGT] ’s claims to help the sick rather than to punish marine workers. The inspectors were still unmoved. When  [TGT]finally interviewed some of the tugboat workers   [TGT]  presented their responses as evidence of wrongdoing rather than as the accounts of workingmen describing their labor. The tugboat captains offered reasonable rationales for sounding whistles. One explained that removing the whistles “would necessitate an extra deckhand to act as messenger to notify the pier hands  besides all the time that would be lost.” Another stated  “We run a risk of losing a whole tide if we do not rouse the crew on the barge.” And yet another  “You must whistle to wake up the crew  which you cannot expect to stay on watch day and night.”
 [TGT]did not relent.  She  went to maritime academics and higher-ups  who endorsed  her  and researched  her  claim. At last   she  won a victory: The National Board of Steam Navigation passed a resolution prohibiting unnecessary whistle-blowing. The tugboat workers adhered for a day or two  and then  finding that work became impossible and that the National Board had no way of enforcing the resolution  returned to using the horns as often as they liked.  [TGT]had had enough.  [TGT]  proposed a law restricting all but a few scenarios in which tugboats can use their whistles  and demanded a standing representative in the Department of Commerce and Labor who would police the waterways for nuisance. In this effort  too   [TGT]  came away empty-handed. Finally  in one last-ditch effort   [TGT]found success. At a meeting of about 10 000 representatives from the transportation industry  the American Association of Masters  Mates  and Pilots passed a resolution ending the use of “indiscriminate and  above all  noisy signaling.” The law was replicated at the federal level under the 1907 Bennet Act  the first anti-noise bill ratified by Congress.  [TGT] ’s use of the poor and the sick as a tool to pass  [TGT]  legislation played little part in why the authorities finally listened. Researchers had found that the signaling was impacting tugboat navigation  making entering and exiting the harbor confusing and unsafe at night.
Throughout  Rice ’s entire ordeal   she  presented the tugboat workers as personal enemies rather than potential allies.  Her  plight for quiet was a moral one; as  she  saw it  the peace had been stolen from  her  by the mariners. Looking back   she  comes off as vindictive and elitist. But unfortunately   her  belligerent approach set the stage for subsequent noise-abatement campaigns in cities around the country. As the historian Emily Thompson explains in her book The Soundscape of Modernity  noise-abatement laws singled out relatively powerless people  those who were seen to impede “the middle-class vision of a well-ordered city.” Among these was the 1908 General Order 47  issued by New York City Police Commissioner Thomas Bingham. It targeted street ruckus rather than port noise: commotion from street vendors  newsboys  tin-can kickers  roller skaters  street musicians  automobile horns  flat-wheeled streetcars  and more. Soon after  laws that banned occupational noises  preventing people from working for a living in order to protect the quietude  appeared in Boston; Little Rock  Arkansas; San Francisco; and elsewhere. These fights hit street workers  most of whom were immigrants  hard. Still  the courts upheld the laws. One infamous incident involved a Chicago ordinance that limited peddlers to certain parts of the city and banned them from advertising using shouting. When the courts upheld this law in 1911  the peddlers first went on strike  and then rioted  causing a mass uprising and widespread damages. The police punished the peddlers  the strike was broken  and the law remained on the books. Soon there were no more vendors walking the streets. By the 1920s and ’30s  noise law after noise law helped clear the urban street. Eventually  it ceased to be the domain of people and was overtaken instead by cars—which created their own noise  of course.
Noise laws also played a key role in the development and implementation of zoning  the separating of a city’s parcels of land into “zones” for which a specific purpose (such as residential  commercial  or industrial) is assigned. A lasting legacy of  [TGT] ’s tugboat campaign was the concept of “quiet zones”—places where noisemaking was especially prohibited because of its potential harm  such as around hospitals  schools  and the houses of the sick. New York set up its first quiet zones in 1908  aided by  [TGT] ’s work in talking to hospital administrators  and other cities followed soon after. Violating a quiet zone usually constituted a misdemeanor offense  punishable by fine  imprisonment  or both. Enforcing anti-noise ordinances troubled legislators at both the local and national levels  especially when the perpetrator of a noise was an industry vital to a city  a conflict that persists to this day. Interfering with commerce in order to protect silence was perfectly acceptable when it limited barkers  peddlers  or other individuals with little power. But when it came to manufacturers  factories  or the transporters of goods  the risk of disturbing commerce outweighed the benefits to the peace. Also  since noise and its treatment in the law was subjective  anti-noise legislation was often ineffective. Police in urban areas had much more pressing issues at hand anyway. However  the idea of “quiet zones” persisted in urban planning. The first zoning laws took noise into account  designating residential zones in places separate from commerce and industry. Like noise-abatement laws  zoning was also built on a foundation of inequality. One of its earliest uses created boundaries separating black and white families  a practice that persisted even after the Supreme Court struck it down in 1917. Middle-class whites looking to prevent lower-income nonwhites (and to some extent lower-income whites as well) from infiltrating their neighborhoods had to come up with a different legal solution.
Today  as suburbanites return to cities  they bring the fight for quiet along with them. To gentrify a neighborhood also involves quieting it down. The desire for sonic control in and around the home is prioritized above the social fabric of the city  a practice exemplified by the targeting of arts and music venues that are cited as being partially responsible for neighborhood revival in the first place. In her book Beyond Unwanted Sound  Marie Thompson describes an example from the industrial area of Ouseburn Valley in the United Kingdom. The region had become a hotbed of music and the arts partly because there were few residences to disturb. Eventually  several venues closed after repeated run-ins with the law due to noise complaints. These complaints came not from concerned locals  but from wealthy newcomers buying into new developments built explicitly to capitalize on the area’s vibrant nightlife. The noise that does the most harm doesn’t come from clubs and house parties—the causes of many garden-variety noise complaints and violations. Ironically   [TGT]did get something right in  [TGT]  crusade: Industrial noise poses the worst problem  although individual workers were not to blame for it  as  [TGT]had also concluded. The two largest sources of environmental noise are transportation and industrial activity. The cars for which early noise ordinances helped clear the streets have amplified that noise to a universal  inescapable level. Industrial areas  often designated for land close to the poorest nonwhite areas in a city  are even worse.
To solve the environmental-noise problem  cities and their citizens should learn from the mistakes of the past. Targeting the noise of individuals is ineffective  antisocial  and fails to eradicate the noise that really hurts people: environmental noise. Solutions to that problem must be systemic  requiring a large-scale  collective response across many different targets. Despite her intentions  Julia Barnett Rice offers a model. She arrived at success only once she began addressing the marine industry at large. Similar approaches can work today. Instead of punishing individual transportation workers whose trucks may be too old  a more comprehensive solution could target the Department of Transportation  with demands to repave worn roads with the porous asphalt configurations used in Europe to reduce tire noise. Likewise  any move toward using renewable energy sources will result in a quieter environment  as coal and oil extraction are extremely noisy labors. At the local and state level  demanding funding for repairs and improvement to outdated transit infrastructure will greatly reduce the noise caused by trains  cars  and trucks. Urban-planning approaches to eliminating noise on a city-by-city basis can be as simple as taking a single lane away from cars and giving it to bicycles  people  or green space. Improving  expanding  and properly funding public transit removes cars from the road  both reducing the sound they produce and replacing it with quieter options like trams and high-speed light-rail. In architecture  acoustics should play a greater role in all structures  from mundane apartment buildings to the grandest art museums. Noise control should be a consideration from the very first planning stage  rather than tacked on as an afterthought.