Noise In The Neighborhood

Yes, club and restaurant owners need to be more vigilant about noise abatement because of the smoking ban. However, smokers are not the major source of noise in front of the Cosmopolitan Condo.

The source is drunk or tipsy groups leaving the bar at all hours and RNR leaving its front doors open while live music plays (accompanied by banging drums), ostensibly to signal that this is a cool place.

The noise started after the owners changed from a bar to more of a club– months before the smoking ban.

Any attempt by the RNR to link this on the smoking ban is a veiled attempt to cast the ban in a negative light. A little more care in managing groups of people leaving the bar in the early hours would go a long way towards RNR improving relations with its neighbors. Shutting the front doors wouldn’t hurt either.

Yah, I don’t see that happening soon.

Since we are dreaming about shutting the doors at RNR; let’s dream that it will become a neighborhood market.

While I can understand that noise is a problem and very frustrating; I can say that pouring water on people is extremely infantile and will not help the situation at all. In fact this type of behavior makes residents look like “the bad guy”!

Yes, pouring water on people doesn’t help matters, and Ms. April is the first to admit that it was childish. But on the other hand, it’s understandable when people reach their limits and their protests fall on the deaf ears of Mr. Sanders and RNR’s management.

There are better ways to handle this, which is by calls to the police non-emergency number 311 (not that they’ll do anything, but for documentation purposes) and ABRA.

FWIW, Metropolitan police are doing a community survey now through March 14, 2007.

You can get to it on line at
http://www.mpdc.dc.gov/communitysurvey

It might be a vehicle to raise concerns about noise and other issues.

Does anyone know who is responsible for playing the classical music on 7th Street? Is it a local establishment of DC govt? I dont mind it during the day but at 3 AM it gets a little old. Literally the music is playing 24/7.

Anon: From what speakers is the music coming from? I know that there are some speakers underneath the Verizon Center where they normally pipe the jumbo-tron audio through.

No – the music is not from the Verizon Center. The music is coming from speakers somewhere between H and G on 7th Street. I walked by the Verizon Center during the day this past weekend and the music was not coming from there.

I do not recall seeing anywhere Ms April apologizing or saying she regretted her childish behavior. In fact she seems to justify it by saying it was just a little bottle of tap water. There is no justification for throwing water on people. I have phoned the police, 911 several times regarding noise and always rec’d a response. Let’s try and behave in a civilized manner! Two wrongs do not make a right. Doing something illegal to someone because they are doing something illegal is not going to help!

Anon@6:29 PM,

Ms. April personally apologized to one of the persons she doused. The article didn’t mention that. Her point about a little bottle of water was that it wasn’t like dropped hot oil on or a bedpan on them.

Nobody is claiming that two wrongs make a right or that this was the right thing to do. She just snapped that night.

Glad you’ve gotten a good response by the police, but I’m sure it wasn’t about RNR. I’ve watched police just sit there and chat it up with Mr. Sanders while disturbances were taking place. In case you didn’t know it, Sanders is a retired cop; these are his friends.

FWIW, I think dumping a bottle of tap water is a much better response to RNR’s noise than calling 911. Let’s save our city’s resources for true emergencies please. Being kept up by drunk girls on a smoke break is NOT an emergency.

I have a solution that should work – if you don’t like noisy streets, move to Fairfax. So sick of the ANCs and DC residents bitching and moaning about noise on the streets when they voluntarily move to a neighborhood like Chinatown/Gallery Place. If you want quiet, you can actually stay in the city and move to a purely residential neighborhood like Logan or Woodley Park. Nightlife is a vital part of a city and those busybodies who wanted the smoking bans now want to complain about smokers making noise outside when they have gone home to go to bed. You live in a city. Get over it. You moved into a building across from Verizon Center – a @#$%ing concert/sports arena. You want quiet then maybe you should think before you move somewhere like Gallery Place. I have ZERO sympathy for you frankly. And I hope to God the DC government, police and bar/restaurant owners do as well. I’m sick of all these arbitrary rules that the city imposes on businesses so you can get a good night’s sleep in your apartment on top of a bar. I’d say the business supplies a lot more tax revenue to the city coiffers than you do so I’m going to have to side with them on this one. Move elsewhere and quit yer bitchin’.

Anon: It’s a pretty suburban attitude to think that everything can and should function in a vacuum in the city.

RnR isn’t the only bar in Gallery Place, yet you don’t hear anyone complaining about the others.. that’s because RnR’s “new concept” seems to operate more like a night club than a bar.

Anon@8:00 PM,

First of all, we were here before RNR or Coyote Ugly. Most of us at the Cosmopolitan put our deposits on our units before they moved in. A number of us were told by the salesperson that a “fine dining” establishment would be occupying that building.

It wasn’t always this way. Things have changed not because of the Cosmopolitan, but because RNR became a bad neighbor. They simply don’t care.

Leaving the front door open while a live band is playing is simply an in-your-face-take-this attitude. Watching people yelling, hooting, hollering and screaming and doing nothing about it shows great indifference.

It wouldn’t take much to control the drunk groups leaving either. Sanders claims to have added more staff, but if he did they’re not for crowd control.

It’s interesting being lectured about urban living by people who don’t live in the city. Your notion that living in a vibrant downtown means people should not be able to get a good night’s rest is an artifice. I suppose that we also should accept muggings since we don’t live in the suburbs like you?

As far as living across from the Verizon Center, you can’t compare this to ther situation at RNR. The Verizon Center has emptied by 10 PM. There are never people leaving Verizon at 12, 1, 2 and 3 AM.

And drop the false argument about smokers being the cause of the noise. It’s drunk patrons screaming at the top of their lungs.

Again, this is easily solvable. Gratuitously antagonizing your neighbors does nothing but create problems down the road.

Enjoy your sleep in the ‘burbs. Trust us, we’ll get ours back.

my point was that smokers standing outside will add to existing noise or create noise that doesn’t exist now. all those La Tasca patrons who want to smoke have to hoof it on to the 7th Street sidewalk to light up. it’s a more attractive proposition to a smoker when it is 70 degrees and nice out. California went through this when they went smokefree in the late ’90s and restaurants had to work out how to keep the noise down.

I will say that when I purchased my place in the PQ, I did have in mind that all that was contractually obligated by the builder was delivery of a 1 BR apartment and a working elevator. I deemed all of their rhetoric about retail tenants (a gourmet grocery store that starts with a B) on the ground floor “nice” but nothing but salesspeak. in fact, that’s what it turned out to be as there was no way they could guarantee an unsigned retail tenant at the time of condo sale.

From the blog: “Gratuitously antagonizing your neighbors does nothing but create problems down the road.”

I think throwing water on people(rather than calling the police on them) would be classsified as antagonizing your beighbors.