Listening to the Roar of 1920s New York

Scenes from 1929 New York from Fox Movietone Newsreels preserved by the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections.

In 1929, New York’s Noise Abatement Commission outfitted a truck with microphones and sound recording devices to measure the city’s din. Researchers made more than 10,000 observations on the truck’s 500-mile journey past construction sites with billowing steam shovels and pounding pile drivers, underneath screeching elevated trains and past the cluster of electronics shops blaring music in Lower Manhattan’s “Radio Row.”

The commission, a short-lived agency that aggressively studied the soundscape to develop policies that would protect the health of the city’s inhabitants, concluded that a Bengal tiger could “roar or snarl indefinitely without attracting the auditory attention of passers-by.”

New Yorkers who believe the cacophony is worse today - with helicopters buzzing overhead and rumbling Fresh Direct trucks on the streets below - should put on a pair of headphones and take a tour around a new Web site that explores the sonic environment of a century ago.

“The Roaring ‘Twenties,” as it is called, was created by Emily Thompson, a historian of sound, technology and cultures of listening at Princeton University who has spent many years thinking about how best to present sonic complaints in the Municipal Archives of the City of New York and videos from the Moving Image Research Collections of the Libraries of the University of South Carolina with the hope of getting people into a 1929 state of mind.

“It’s my attempt to build a time machine,” she said.

There are hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles that chronicle the city’s struggle to contain the racket; letters from aggrieved citizens about loud ash collectors and ice cream men; plus more than 50 newsreels with synchronous sound footage that give a grainy vision of an environment defined by the growth of skyscrapers, the excavation of elevated railways, thundering internal combustion engines and whistling policemen.

Municipal Archives of the City of New York A letter from Dr. C. Burns Craig to the health commissioner asking for relief from whistles and sirens on the East River dated April 13, 1931. Click Here to Enlarge

In one letter dated Oct. 5, 1932, Mr. N. Schmuck of 137 Milton Street in Brooklyn, complained to the health department about the Colonial Pickle Works on Greenpoint Avenue. The department’s commissioner, a man named Dr. Shirley W. Wynne, responded the following day in a surprising show of government efficiency and courtesy, assuring that Mr. Schmuck’s complaint had been referred to the sanitation department “for investigation and appropriate action.”

“There was optimism that science and technology could solve the problem that isn’t present today,” Ms. Thompson said.

Though the backbone of the site is the perniciousness of sound, the Fox Movietone newsreels from 1926 through 1930 provide a portal to the vitality and exuberance of street life at the time. In one, squealing pigs slide down a chute on Coney Island as a barker announces: “Luna Park Pig Slide… three balls for ten cents… ten balls for a quarter… hear that little pig squeal…”

Voyeurs and the curious can search the vast network of content by date, keyword or by location on a zoomable Google map overlaid with a black and white map from 1933. It took more than three years to develop the site, said Ms. Thompson. She worked with Scott Mahoy, a Web designer she met through Vectors, an online journal at the University of Southern California dedicated to multimedia literacy, which sponsored the project.

How to define noise, pinpoint it and how to temper human and mechanical outbursts make it a vexing issue for policy makers; but for historians, it is an ideal topic to dissect, Ms. Thompson said.

“It’s a wonderful lens to see what a society is worried about and to understand the people more in general,” she added. “If you listen carefully, you can learn a lot about a culture.”

A taxonomy of sound as presented in the Noise Abatement Commission’s landmark study in 1930, “City Noise.”  Click Here to Enlarge