Lens 3 of 5: the clock
Forget where and look at when. Cut the city into 1,100 ft cells and ask each one: at what time of day, compared with the city as a whole, are you unusually loud? Colour the answer, and New York splits into a day city and a night city.
times louder at 23:00 than at 05:00
New York as a whole follows one curve. Complaints climb from six in the morning, jump after six in the evening and peak at eleven at night, the hour with incidents over eleven years. The bottom, at five in the morning, has . The map on the previous step corrects for this curve: it shows where each place sits relative to it.
Incidents by hour of the day, all days, 2015 to 2025.
Yellow and orange cells peak in daylight: Midtown, the Financial District, Long Island City, the airports' edges. Their noise is construction, ventilation units, engines, helicopters, and it is filed by people at work. Blue and violet cells peak after dark: upper Manhattan, the Bronx, central Brooklyn, most of Queens. Their noise is music and neighbours, filed by people at home.
At noon, of incidents are construction and machines. At 23:00, are music and parties.
Play the day. Each frame is the density of complaints filed in that hour, all years stacked. The night city lights up first in Washington Heights and the South Bronx, then Bushwick and Flatbush, then fades block by block after two. The day city turns on at seven, in Manhattan, and never gets as bright.
Brightness uses a square-root scale so the quiet hours stay visible.
xthe weekday count at 23:00
At eleven on a Saturday night the city files times as many complaints as on a Monday to Thursday night, and the peak lasts longer: at one in the morning it is still times a weekday. Friday sits in between. Sunday is quiet by midnight.
Incidents by hour: Monday to Thursday average (grey), Friday (amber), Saturday (coral), Sunday (teal).
June has times the incidents of February. Windows open, parties move to the street, and the night city expands into hours and places that stay quiet in winter.
Incidents by month, all years.
The clock is about when people report, and reporting has its own rhythm: people call from home, after work, when they are trying to sleep. A construction site that runs all day may still peak at seven in the morning, when it woke somebody up. And this lens flattens eleven years into one day. The next one pulls the years apart.
Same dots, another lens: change