Come On, Feel the Noise
Our Manhattan apartment sits at the mouth of one of the world’s busiest tunnels. Here’s how we leveraged the unrelenting racket.
DURING THE COVID PANDEMIC’S second year, my wife, a New York City native who always wanted to replant her feet there, had an idea: Let’s rent a small apartment in addition to our home outside Pittsburgh. Since both of us had professional and personal reasons to be in New York, it seemed like an excellent idea.
She secured us a tiny pied-à-terre in SoHo, one of Manhattan’s coolest neighborhoods. How was this accomplished? Because, it turned out, the third-floor apartment overlooks the final block of the city before the mouth of the Holland Tunnel — one of New York City’s busiest and most raucous exits, with New Jersey sitting on the other end.
After a few nights of truculent honking and all manner of music blasting from cars until 3 a.m., I began to realize why the term “bridge and tunnel” is not a compliment in New York.
PEOPLE DON’T REALIZE when they hear the phrase “the city that never sleeps” that it refers to New York itself — not the actual people in it. We knew we couldn’t actually stop the noise. But maybe we could reclaim it, make it our own somehow. If not the honking, then at least the music.
Inspiration struck one morning as a very loud version of Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” reverberated through our front-window air conditioner before dawn. I realized it was time to look for help from the two S’s — Shazam and Spotify. It was time to broaden my musical horizons in a way that could circumvent the social-media algorithms that keep trying to tell me what I’ll like by gauging my playing history and my friends’ tastes.
So for that entire summer, every time I left our apartment and encountered a wall of gridlock outside the front door, I pulled out my phone. Then, thanks to the modern miracle that is Shazam, I captured the music that was blasting out at me.
Sometimes I snagged a song in passing. Sometimes I sat quietly on the stoop and waited for opportunities to digitally pounce. Sometimes I pressed the phone up against our bedroom window to grab a few notes from a car inching by below. A couple times, thanks to the gridlock, I even wandered amongst the vehicles trying to collect music like some modern-day songcatcher scouring back roads for undiscovered nuggets from The People.
THE FIRST SONG that I corraled was Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” The rest of the songs I corraled as the summer dawned, peaked and ebbed were nothing like Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”
It’s exactly the kind of anthropological cross-section that fascinates me — unlikely curation, if you will. Drivers by the dozen, dumped down a two-lane chute into a narrow dark passage under a river, trying to ease the gridlock with some tunes. An unremitting, unwitting queue of impatient people with their windows down (and sometimes up!) have guided me to songs I didn’t know, songs I didn’t know I would absolutely love — and, of course, some songs I didn’t know I would absolutely hate.
So without further ado, as our second summer at the tunnel’s mouth winds to an end, here are the songs of my Holland Tunnel Approach playlist — in the order they were captured from querulous drivers (and continue to be, albeit more intermittently now).
Enjoy. Or don’t. But remember: When it comes to the question of whether to listen to them, you have a choice. Most of the time, in our tiny apartment on Watts Street, we do not.
This seems like an opportune time to inform you that I wrote a 2007 book, Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song, a cultural history of the song “House of the Rising Sun” and how it spread across Appalachia, the nation and the world. Learn more about it here.
Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud. Cars don’t belong in cities.