Lens 4 of 5: change
Drop the same complaints into hexagons 750 ft across and pull two years apart. On the left, 2019, the last ordinary year. On the right, 2025. Drag the divider across the city.
+%incidents, 2019 to 2025
The city filed noise incidents in 2019 and in 2025. The jump happened in one year: 2020 alone rose by half, when the city was locked down and everyone was home to hear everyone else. The level never returned. 2025 is the loudest year in the record after the one-per-hour rule; counted as raw requests it is far louder still.
Noise incidents per year, 2015 to 2025. The city warns that 311 data for 2020 and 2021 is incomplete.
hexagons at least twice as loud
Colour each hexagon by 2025 divided by 2019. Of the hexagons with enough incidents to compare, at least doubled and got quieter. The rise is not uniform: it is a pattern of places.
Teal: fewer incidents in 2025 than in 2019. Grey: within 20%. Orange: up more than 20%. Amber: at least doubled. Hexagons with fewer than 50 incidents across both years are left blank.
Incidents per year by borough, indexed to 2019 = 100. Queens (amber), Bronx (coral), Brooklyn (teal), Manhattan (lilac), Staten Island (grey).
Two of the biggest jumps are not about neighbours at all. The Upper West Side went from incidents in 2019 to in 2025, almost all of them helicopters. Howard Beach, under the approach to JFK, went from to , the same story. Corona, South Jamaica and Claremont in the Bronx rose for the older reason: music and parties, filed from home.
The quiet hexagons are scattered, not clustered: the Navy Yard, a few blocks in Flushing, the far corners of Staten Island and Queens. Nowhere fell far. In a city where filing a complaint got easier every year, going quiet is the exception.
Change in complaints is change in complaining. 311 went mobile, then online, and each new channel lowered the effort to file. A hexagon that doubled may have twice the noise or twice the phones. The lens cannot separate them, and it does not say what kind of noise grew. That is the last lens.
Same dots, another lens: the mix