courtesy Municipal Archives of the City of New York.
City Noise (New York City Department of Health, 1930), frontispiece
The sonic content is encountered through fifty-four clips of sound newsreel footage, Fox Movietone newsreels from 1926 to 1930. The films come from the Moving Image Research Collections of the Libraries of the University of South Carolina. Fog horns, shouting peddlers, rumbling elevated trains, pounding riveters, and shouting children were all captured by the microphones and cameras of the Movietone men as they traversed the city searching for news to record. Much of the footage here was never edited into the published newsreels shown in cinemas at the time, thus it is seen and heard on this website for the first time since those images and sounds were captured on film. To construct a context for hearing these films, the site additionally presents a rich collection of data and documents from the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, testifying to and elaborating upon the problem of noise in the modern city. Aggravated citizens wrote letters to the Mayor and to the Commissioner of Health, describing in sometimes angry,
sometimes pitiable tones the noises that vexed them. The surprisingly efficient bureaucracy of the Department of Health responded and sometimes alleviated their distress. Almost 600 complaints – all that have been located within the Archive for this period – are catalogued, charting the sounds of urban life from the cradle to the grave. Or rather, from the noise of a maternity hospital to the clamour of a monument-maker’s stone yard. Three hundred and fifty different letters and memos are reproduced for users to engage with directly. The historical context is elaborated further through a range of additional documents and data. City Noise , the 300-page report of New York’s Noise Abatement Commission, is presented in its entirety. Hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles are excerpted, and a multimedia historical narrative is available for those who still take comfort in linear accounts offering concrete beginnings and endings.
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