By John Surico, City Lab, June 21, 2019.
The corner of Canal and Hudson Street at rush hour may be the loudest place in New York City. That’s when the daily share of its 1.26 million monthly vehicles—1.2 million cars, nearly 13,000 buses, and close to 85,000 trucks, as of March—slug through the Holland Tunnel, spilling out onto tight Manhattan corridors built for traffic half the size. Mix that honking, yelling, clattering, and rumbling with the din of constant construction (there are nine active permits within a three-block vicinity, per the city’s active construction map) and infrastructure upgrades, and voilà, you have one noisy mess.
At this intersection you can often experience the perfectly normal New York thing of not being able to hear the person walking next to you. When I approached on a recent morning, I saw a few businessmen start a conversation, and then pause with visual gestures, choosing to be off of Canal before resuming.
This seemed like a good spot to take a noise survey, which is what I was doing, on Hush City, an open-source app that seeks to map out the quiet (and not-so-quiet) corners of cities worldwide. I wanted to see if I could find one here, of all places. So I walked about 100 feet to Freeman Plaza East, a newly made oasis of green in a sea of metal. The decibel level here, according to my iPhone: 59.2 dbA, about six decibels above the World Health Organization (WHO) standard for daytime noise. But, as New York noise goes, not bad. I took some photos of cars and trucks, all trying to turn northward with the help of a sole crossing guard. I was then asked to describe my reception of the sound on Canal itself—I chose words like “unpleasant” and “anger.” Then I submitted my entry, adding my first-hand report from the park to those from other Hush City users.
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