In Response to, "If you don't like noise, don't live downtown."

[mbarrick]

I moved downtown to close to transit and services so I don't have to own a car just to get groceries, visit a friend, go to a gallery, see a movie, so I can go out to a bar or a club to make noise and conveniently get home, etc.. I have no tolerance for suburban yahoos that live in the sprawling hells spawned from the failed urban planning ideal of the 1950's that take watching someone imported from Scandinavia or wherever for no other merit than their ability to hit a hunk of rubber with a stick as a personal victory based on what shirt they paid to wear entitles them to circle their cars around residential neighbourhoods hooting and honking, largely because they saw someone else get away with it. Twenty, thirty, and more years ago we had Seafest, the PNE parade, beer-gardens on the beach at English Bay, nightclubs on Georgia, a plethora after-hours and alternative clubs in Yaletown, and a greater number of fun things to do because they all hadn't been ruined by invasions of suburban yobs or torn down by festivals of corporate greed aimed at that audience, like the Olympics and Expo'86.

I'm not against fun. I'm vehemently irritated by stupid people that ruin it and people who entitle them with unresolved opinions and ill-conceived sloganeering like, "If you don't like noise, don't live downtown."

Comments

[sciencequeen.livejournal.com]

Well...I have definitely been "that person" to make comments like that...keep in mind you do live in a loudish part of downtown (granted you're not on Granville St. but you do live next to a large traffic artery). There are sections of the West End that are less loud, but would you say the loudness from "fun" versus loudness of "rubber hitting surburban yobs" really sounds that different at 3am on a Saturday night??

The thing that bothers me about downtown people that feel entitled to a "quiet neighbourhood" is that silly things start happening, such as all the one-way streets in Yaletown being changed to two-way streets, so that they couldn't be used as traffic arteries anymore. Great. So all the cars that would come through downtown anyway now have less options and more bottlenecking to deal with. From what I understand, the Yaletown residents association (I'm not sure if that's what they are called, but I think it's a valid guess) said that "one-way streets are not 'neighbourhoodly' enough, and we want less traffic noise" and then the changes were made.

Now to that situation I definitely said "THEN WHY DID YOU MOVE TO YALETOWN?!" I don't really think people should expect to live in a metropolitan centre and not have to deal with some boorishness. As long as your safety isn't being compromised, it is the "price" you pay for having everything at your fingertips. It's not always going to be suburban people criticizing you...it might just be people in other Vancouver neighbourhoods. ;)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

The primary thing that saved Vancouver from urban blight was a conscious effort to limit traffic. Oddly enough the only reason the building I live in is still standing is because, for a time in the late 1950's, Bute St. was slated to be widened for a freeway on-ramp that would have connected the freeway the current Granville bridge was built for in 1954 to the freeway that was slated to cut through Gastown (which is why the city owns the building Club 23 West is in - it was bought to be town down and paved over), meeting at a third crossing. There was no value in demolishing and redeveloping this lot at the time when buildings like this one weren't yet "heritage" and were just "old" and undesirable.

What has kept Vancouver from going down the road of urban Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities that invested too heavily in car-culture in the middle part of the 20th century is intentional measures to *keep* people living downtown, walking to work, walking to the grocer, walking to the pub. The suburban yob in the car is the enemy of the livable, sustainable city.

Now, when someone moves into a building across the street from a nightclub and is surprised by the noise, I am equally unsympathetic. That's unfathomably stupid. I used to live in a building right next to the railyard in Gastown, for example, and had no problem with the noise made by freight-trains being assembled every two hours, twenty-four hours a day. I don't mind as people from the bar around the corner or walking home from the restaurants on Robson talk and laugh as they walk by and am happy this city chose to make this street a pedestrian thoroughfare rather than an automotive one.

In a nutshell, I'm largely content with the people who live, work, AND play downtown. I'm intolerant of the people who think they can drive in, cause trouble with no consequence they have to live with, and go safely home. I don't go to Surrey and rip plants out of their gardens, pee in their garages, and honk my horn and yell incoherently under their bedroom window.

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

'I don't go to Surrey and rip plants out of their gardens, pee in their garages, and honk my horn and yell incoherently under their bedroom window.'

though it'd sure get the message across.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

I don't go to Surrey and rip plants out of their gardens, pee in their garages, and honk my horn and yell incoherently under their bedroom window.

but you probably should...ha ha...

[valerian.livejournal.com]

To my horror one night around 11:30pm, I watched a drunk 20something male in a Canucks jersey stop on the sidewalk directly in front of the old house in the lot beside us, whip down his fly, and pee on their lawn. His friends were further down the street laughing and telling him to hurry up or else they were going to drive home without him. No effort was made to conceal his act; there was a secluded alley and a dumpster not 30 feet away from him. This was a wide open stretch of grass on someone's nicely groomed FRONT LAWN.

Why do I think he was from suburbia? Because he so obviously didn't care, as if since it wasn't his city, he'd never run into anyone he knew who'd find out what as ass he was. For me, it's not the noise so much as the ass-hattery that goes on.

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

this.

I don't mind normal city noise. Heck, bring on some summer hooting and hollering, i'll give you friday and saturday night, but when it's midweek raves in the apt next door, then no, I don't care for it.

People don't grasp, i suspect, the gradations of noise one gets in the city. MInd you, i'm 33 floors up, I hear NOTHING.

I recall there being some casual report that a great deal of the inner city/downtown core noise being the suburban yobs, who don't get that people live in the towers above and why do they care anyway.

But I've only been right smack downtown here a few times and granted it's party time in full swing, there was a distinct lack of screaming yahoos. I'm certain they exist, but they are few.

I sort of loved and hated gastown, because the bars just got people utterly smashed beyond all comprehension and the clubs there drew the screaming woo girls and frat boys pissing and puking all over. I don't mind event noise, but drunken yob noise?

( halifax was horrendous. small university town of kids new to the big city.)

i don't want to live in far suburbia with a house and a car. I don't need it. What I ask in return is that there's not some barbie screaming WOOOOOOoo on wednesday at 3 am as her boyfriend ken barfs all over.

I think those are fair trades.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY!

[logik.livejournal.com]

Michael, while I can understand your frustration, this problem is not new. Downtown has ALWAYS attracted hooliganism. There are newspaper articles that bitch about it all the way back to 1910, well before you moved downtown.

The bottom line is that for those of us that live downtown, the occasional irritating noise is the price we pay for convienience. You can't move onto a volcano because you like volcanic soil in your garden, and then bitch about how the mountain has changed and gotten really mean spirited with all that magma from out of the neighborhood.

I live right in the middle of fireworks terrirtory, right on the main strip for pride, a block away from 3 night clubs, 4 pubs and a beach that goes all night in the summer. It's noisy as hell sometimes, and you know what... I like it. It reminds me that there is still life in this city.

Yeah, I being woken up at 5 am to a harley backfiring isn't always my favorie thing, but there are so many worse things in life that it strikes me that yelping about it is no different that sitting on a rocker on your porch and yelling about those damn kids on your lawn, and their rocka rocka rock n roll devil music.

I love it down here and wouldn't trade the noise because I know it would also mean giving up the things that make this neighborhood awesome.

I have to agree, if you don't like noise, don't live downtown. There are lots of good quiet neightborhoods 10 minutes from downtown with a car that is easily more than paid for by a difference in the rent, with a hell of a lot more space to boot. I happen to like the noise of a city, and honestly, it's totally worth being down here.