The Green Boom Lift
How do you deal with the noise that makes your city vibrant?
A man in a high visibility shirt kneels in the bucket of a green boom lift across the street from my apartment. He stands and the machine bounces. For a moment, he looks at a handheld tool (I can’t tell what it is), then holds up a long strip of gleaming metal. He puts the metal inside a large hole in the exterior of the building and hits a control to lower himself to the ground. The machine’s descent alarm sounds: bee boo bee boo beeeeep.
Most days, the man (or one of his coworkers) uses the green boom lift on a small incline. The machine has another safety feature, a tilt alarm. The tilt alarm sounds continuously whenever the machine isn’t level: bee boo bee boo beeeeep. I called the building last week to complain. People are trying to work! I said. The gym is moving, they told me. This is now week three of the project; I’d bet on at least three more.
Torontonians and visitors to the city made almost twenty-thousand official noise complaints last year. Construction noise accounted for a quarter of these—the second biggest category after amplified sound, which accounted for half. I love the city’s noise complaint categories because I recognize all of them pounding through my closed windows.
Before the gym move, I heard construction noise from the power company replacing a transformer. For amplified sound, I’m on a parade and protest route and hear megaphones and speakers. There’s regular loading and unloading noise, often in the middle of the night. Motor vehicle noise from trucks and motorcycles. Power device noise courtesy of leaf blowers. The stationary source noise of my own building’s generators. And finally, the unreasonable and persistent noise of people shouting. Oh, in this last category, there’s a guy on an electric skateboard who practices opera, too. Or maybe he’s in musicals?
At Hot Docs, a documentary film festival in Toronto, director Cat Mills recently premiered Do You Hear What I Hear? The eight-minute documentary profiles two activists who are working to change Toronto’s noise bylaws. The city's Municipal Licensing & Standards division is reviewing the noise bylaws in the fall.
“What can the city do?” I asked Mills after the screening.
“The easy fix is going after the mufflers,” she said. A lot of auto body shops illegally install mufflers that actually increase a vehicle’s sound. It’s an aesthetic. Vroom vroom.
But the problem is more complicated for construction noise. Toronto currently ranks first for the number of tower cranes in North America, with 238; that’s almost five times second place (Seattle). Almost everywhere you look, there’s a huge project with metal and machines clanging. The green boom lift across from my apartment is one of the many smaller ones, which—I assure you—can also produce a lot of noise.
Without continued pressure from activists, a noise bylaw review is unlikely to change much about the sound of Toronto’s enormous momentum. I get angry when it disturbs me, but then I try to laugh. After all, I choose to live in the middle of it, making noise in my own way. Type type. Send send send.
When the green boom lift beeps its boops, I pop in a good pair of earplugs and keep working. I want to write more about how we can honor our hearing.
My books, etc.
I’m currently querying agents with my memoir manuscript, Ghost Tones. You can read more about it at my new website. If you know a literary agent and you think, wait a minute, they might get along with Angus—I’d love to reach out to them.
Two recommendations
Sarah Polley’s Run Towards The Danger. From my reading journal: “Here and there, often, I’m crying. It’s the honesty around making decisions with your children in mind.”
Koffee’s West Indies. I could listen to this song any time of day.
Thank you for reading my newsletter, which is hosted on Substack and called Experiments in Pith. Big thanks to Lana Hall for being my first reader on this one.