Same dots, five lenses
The data never changes: every noise complaint New Yorkers filed with 311 in eleven years, placed on the map. What changes is the geometry we lay over it. Streets, precinct lines, the clock, two years side by side, a grid of sound. Each chapter is a short story on its own.
Snap every complaint to its street segment and the city stops being neighbourhoods. It becomes a few thousand very loud blocks and tens of thousands of quiet ones.
Noise goes to the police, and precinct boundaries decide who answers. Within a few hundred feet of a line, the same kind of call is closed at very different speeds on each side.
Colour each place by the hour it peaks and the city splits into a daytime New York of drills and horns and a night New York of music and parties, with a border between them.
Bin the map into hexagons and compare 2019 with 2025. Complaints rose by half citywide, but the rise is not everywhere: a third of the city doubled, a quarter got quieter.
Loud music wins almost every hexagon. Ask instead which sound is unusually common for its place and a second city appears: construction in Midtown, engines in Queens, helicopters along the water.
The five maps next to each other, with one sentence each on what it cannot show. The same data, five honest answers.
How the counting works
- Source
- NYC Open Data, 311 Service Requests (datasets 76ig-c548 and erm2-nwe9), extracted 19 September 2026. Complaint types starting with "Noise", 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2025.
- Requests
- requests in the period, of them with coordinates. Requests without a location are left out.
- Incidents
- A few addresses file hundreds of requests a day, sometimes for months. To stop them drowning everyone else, the unit used in every chapter is the incident: the first request at the same coordinate, for the same kind of sound, within the same clock hour. That leaves incidents, of requests. Chapter 1 shows what happens without this rule.
- Sound classes
- Six groups built from the 311 descriptor: music and parties; neighbours (banging, talking, television); vehicles (car music, horns, idling); construction and machines (including alarms and ventilation); helicopters; animals.
- Time to close
- Hours between the request and its closure by the responding agency, kept when it is between zero and thirty days. For police noise calls "closed" mostly means an officer responded or the caller could not be reached; it is a proxy for response speed, not for the noise stopping.
- Geography
- Borough, precinct and neighbourhood boundaries and the street centreline file are from the same portal. Everything is projected once to New York State Plane (feet) and drawn as it is. Hexagons have a 750 ft radius. No map tiles are used.
- Limits
- The city warns that 2020 and 2021 do not present a full picture of 311 activity. Helicopter complaints are placed where the caller was, not where the aircraft was. A complaint is a report, not a measurement of decibels: quiet places with active reporters look loud.