Pride Week Organizers Vow Quieter Parties on a Tribeca Pier
Thousands of partiers jammed into a dance on Pier 26 for the third day and night of Heritage of Pride events. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
In response to a flood of noise complaints from neighbors last year, organizers of the annual Heritage of Pride Festival are vowing a more neighborly presence when they return in June to Tribeca's Pier 26, at Hubert Street, with three days of concerts and events.
Residents said the music from the events last June, capped by a “Dance on the Pier” that was attended by thousands and featured a performance by Cher, rattled their windows and walls, drowned out phone conversations and otherwise compromised their quality of life. Complaints about the festivities, largely from residents of the nearby Independence Plaza apartment complex, poured into 311, Community Board 1 and the 1st Precinct.
“The problem was three days of very, very loud music from the afternoon to the evening—so loud that we heard every comment,” Diane Lapson, the president of Independence Plaza’s Tenant Association, told Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee Wednesday evening. “Cher was in my living room, let’s put it that way.”
In an attempt to point the sound away from neighboring residences, the loudspeaker layout will be "drastically improved," according to Chris Frederick, the managing director of Heritage of Pride. The stage will be placed in the middle of the pier, and speakers will stand on the south end, pointing north. Independence Plaza is to the east and south of the pier.
“That way, the sound isn’t bouncing back to the south, and it’s not going east,” Frederick said at the meeting. “It is my understanding that this will drastically improve the sound.”
Repositioning the speakers had been one of the potential compromises that Frederick placed before the board’s Quality of Life committee last summer, in the heat of anger over the Heritage of Pride concerts as well as nine others that were sponsored by the Hudson River Park Trust. (That series, under the control of the Trust, will not return.)
But committee member Mitchell Frohman, a professional musician, said more could be done.
“Instead of the giant speakers, you have smaller speakers, placed maybe every 100 yards so people in the back could hear it,” Frohman suggested. “You don’t have to have it booming loud.”
Tom Lindon, the vice president of marketing and affairs for the Hudson River Park Trust, told Frohman that an acoustic sound consultant will help to “weigh in on the direction of those speakers, the volume of those speakers, and he will make those recommendations.”
Grazia Vita, an Independence Plaza resident, said she was concerned about the noise emanating from sound-checks early in the morning.
“Is it possible to start the music not at 9 in the morning, maybe later on in the day so that children can sleep?” Vita asked.
“We are going to be adhering to strict sound check requirements,” Lindon responded, saying they may take place in the early afternoon and for a “short period.”
“We will work together [and] we will make sure that we are doing it at the right time,” he added.
Frederick said organizers would meet with residents to discuss their plans, as well as attend CB1's Quality of Life Committee meeting next month.
This year’s festivities on Pier 26, he said, will begin on June 27, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., with events and music aimed at LGBT youth. The next day, a dance for lesbians, called Tease, will take place from 4 to 10 p.m. Dance on the Pier, for gay men and the largest of the events, takes place on June 29 and ends with a musical performance and fireworks.