rivka | Entries tagged with neighbors

If our houses are about fifteen feet apart, and they face each other at the back, and between my bedroom and the back of my house is a landing and my kid's room and a bathroom, and another neighbor's air conditioner is running, and it's 3:30 in the morning, and I can hear you having sex,

YOU ARE TOO DAMN LOUD.

Thank you.

Chaste hugs and kisses,
Rivka

Several times in the last two months, we've gotten a call from the woman who rents the studio apartment beneath our house, asking us to keep Alex quieter because she is sleeping. It particularly bothers her when Alex runs back and forth along our main room, or when Alex has a friend over and they're running around together. Each time, we have taken Alex outside or blocked her in so that she can't run around.

All of these complaints have happened after 9:30am, and usually much later. Today, for example, she called at 10:30. I ran into her outside later, and finally asked what her work and sleep schedules are. She said that she works from 3:30pm to midnight, and "the earliest I'm ever awake is 11:30."

My question is this: when someone works a late shift, is it reasonable for them to expect their neighbors to keep nighttime-style quiet levels during the day? So far we have responded as though it is, and I do have sympathy for her need to sleep. But I am also starting to feel annoyed about it.

Morning is the biggest part of Alex's day - in the afternoon, there's often less than two hours between the post-nap snack and dinner preparation. Morning is when kids her age socialize. If we're supposed to be quiet until at least after 11:30, that means never being able to host playgroup. "Active play belongs outside" is a hard rule to enforce with a toddler - they tend to be active all day long, or to switch back and forth between quiet and active play in short bursts, and they need to be active even when the weather is too bad to play outside. We do go out a lot - the children's museum, the science center, the library, (if weather will ever permit it again) the park, and just for long get-out-of-the-house walks in the neighborhood. But we can't always go out all morning long.

The rest of our house is not really set up for playing. Alex's room is on the third floor, at the top of an extremely steep and dangerous flight of steps. It doesn't have much floor space, and we don't keep any of her toys up there - it's just for sleeping. The second floor has our bedroom and study, which are cluttered with furniture, cords and cables, and a million things she's not supposed to mess with. Our indoor play space is pretty much the living-dining room, period. (We have a back courtyard for outdoor play space, but I know from bitter experience that sound travels very well from the basement apartment to the courtyard, and presumably vice versa.)

So: should we require Alex to be sedentary whenever she's indoors before lunchtime? Or is our neighbor expecting too much? I'm looking for honest opinions here, and not just back patting, because I fully recognize that my prior experience with this neighbor is coloring my view of the situation. I just keep thinking, "She's got a lot of damn gall, to be complaining to us about noise."

I just called the cops on the neighbors again.[1]

Our landlord came by a couple of weeks ago to take down the windowboxes, because painters were coming. He told us that one of the neighbors was moving out of state, and that the other one wanted to renew the lease in her own name. Did we think that would be a problem?

No, we stupidly said. If they're separating, that should take care of it.

Meanwhile, they kept fighting - mostly late at night and early in the morning - and we kept hearing them. But it never crossed the "I have to call the police now" line, so I just gritted my teeth and waited.

Tonight the screaming argument started around 6:45, as Michael was leaving for a church Board meeting and I was taking Alex upstairs for her bath. They were still at it when I brought her downstairs, and worse - there was an awful, shuddering wailing. I heard... things... being slammed around.

"The wild things roared their terrible roars, and gnashed their terrible teeth!" I read to Alex, raising my voice so that she wouldn't hear the crying. Except that, really, I was trying to block it out for myself. She didn't seem to notice.

"...and into the night of his very own room, where he found his supper waiting for him. And it was still hot. Okay, Mama needs to make a phone call now."

9-1-1, I punched with shaking fingers. I told the dispatchers that my neighbors were having what seemed to be a violent fight. Weapons? she asked me. I told her no, I didn't think so, but that there was a history of domestic violence.

Then I sat down and read Alex another story, every nerve in my body tensed to see flashing lights outside the window. She wanted more books, but instead I hauled her upstairs. Fortunately, she didn't want a long bedtime routine. "Alex crib," she suggested as soon as we entered her room, and I was happy to comply.

This time the cop stayed a while. It sounded like one of the neighbors came out on the street to argue with him at length about whether or not the other one was going to come out and talk to him too - I heard him say "Well, her story might be different from your story, and that might be different from upstairs' story. I'm just doing my job." He knocked on my door at one point to ask me to repeat exactly what I'd heard, and I think that one of them was in the street while he did it - so if we ever had even a thin veneer of confidentiality to these complaints, that's certainly gone now.

He left without arresting anyone. I called the landlords. I am feeling awfully jumpy about being in the house alone. I hate that we have a blind front door - no peephole, and no overlooking window. I just bewildered the hell out of someone from the O'Malley campaign who'd come to drop off a sign for our railing, because I insisted that he shout his identification and purpose through the door.

This afternoon at work I found myself oddly tense - shoulders hunched, back aching, anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. And then I realized why: some women a couple of offices down were having a loud, cheerful conversation. Hearing muffled raised voices of African-American women was sending me over the edge into a fight-or-flight response.

I just can't take much more of this.

[1] Backstory 1, 2, 3.

Michael woke me up at 6:40 this morning so that he could put Alex into bed with me while he called the police. Downstairs they were shouting, and he heard the sound of someone knocking - or being knocked - into furniture.

The police officer came to our door first. Michael told him what he'd heard, and that the neighbors appeared to have a history of domestic violence. We heard the cop go to the downstairs entrance and knock. A few seconds later he came back up, sat in his car for a minute or two (Me: "Maybe he's running the address to pull up their history?"), and then drove away. I don't know if he even spoke to them, or if they didn't answer the door and he just left.

Thanks to all of you for your sympathy and advice on the situation with our neighbors. One of our landlords called on Sunday to tell us that she would be bringing a lead inspector by this week, and I told her about the situation. She was extremely sympathetic and agreed that the situation is not fair to us, in addition to being alarming. Interestingly enough, she seemed to think that she had an idea about who the aggressor was. She's going to intervene.

She also told us that one of them is going to be away all this week on military duty. So we should at least have a week of peace and quiet. Whew.

I thought about making this post last night. If I had, it would've been very different.

Here's what I would have written then:

Something needs to be done about our downstairs neighbors. They've just had a screaming, door-slamming fight at the tops of their lungs - sounds like they're moving back and forth from their apartment to the sidewalk in front of the house. I'd like to say that this is an isolated incident, but the only real difference from the status quo is that this time they're louder. We hear them fighting almost every day - usually early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes loud sex, too, but it's the fighting that bothers me.

About a year ago, I guess, I called the cops on them. It was early on a Saturday morning. I heard angry yelling, and then the unmistakable sound of a body falling heavily against furniture. I dialed 911 and told them I thought I was hearing domestic violence downstairs, and then sat around shaking, waiting for the fallout. An hour or so later, one of the downstairs neighbors came up to apologize. She told me that they had some friends visiting, and had been out all night partying. One of their friends was "drunk and stupid," and while they were trying to get him calmed down he fell over some boxes. She talked about neighborly respect and sounded as though she thought I had made a glorified noise complaint; I explained that I didn't care if they got loud, and only intervened because I thought someone was being hurt. At the time, the whole conversation seemed plausible enough.

But the fighting is getting worse and worse. It's very audible from our house. (We have the three-story main house, and the basement is a separate studio apartment.) I've never had to deal with neighbor noise like this before - parties or loud music, sure, but not vicious shouting, day after day. It's really upsetting me. And I don't want Alex exposed to it, either.

I'm not sure what can be done about it, though. We really don't know them at all - just in a "here, this letter got delivered to the wrong box" sort of way. In the midst of the door slamming last night, I wanted to go out and tell them to shut the hell up, but I was afraid. I've thought about leaving a letter in their mailbox, letting them know how much they're disturbing us. I've thought about complaining to the landlord. Calling the police again doesn't seem likely to do any good. I don't want to keep living like this, but I don't know how to make it stop.

What happened today:

The worst fight yet. I heard them clearly from the second floor, two floors away from them. Michael and Alex were driven in from playing in the backyard - it must have been practically like being right there in the basement apartment with them. All three of us fled the house together, and once we were outside, Michael told me that he'd heard one of them screaming that she didn't intend to let herself be hit anymore.

Shit.

We don't know which one of them it was. They're both women, so we can't go by either the voice or the statistical probabilities. If we did know who it was, our course would be simple: find a way to tell the victim that we know what's happening, and offer our help if she wants to leave or needs a safe place quickly during an argument. Call the cops the next time we hear anything. But we don't know, and making contact with the wrong person could have negative consequences for the victim.

We can still call the police if we hear anything suggestive - or just on general principles, when the fights get loud. But if the cops get there and our neighbors insist that everything's fine, they can't do anything.

I feel like I have the responsibility to do something to make it stop. I just don't know what that thing could be. In the meantime, of course it make hearing them fight much, much more awful. What a nightmare.