New Focus for Noise Fighter -- More Recruits

By Jordan Moss

Four years after founding the Bronx Campaign for Peace and Quiet, John Dallas is looking to broaden his organization's mandate and add troops to his war on noise.

Dallas, who has penned the popular Sound Advice column in the Norwood News for over two-and-a-half years, has been something of a one-man show -- fielding noise questions from all over the city, conducting forums and workshops, and being the all-around answerman on all matters acoustic.

Now he's looking for help, and it's not just because the 37-year-old paralegal can't handle his ambitious civic workload alone. He believes that a major part of the solution to the noise problem lies with citizens themselves.

"I don't want the community just to complain," Dallas says. "I think it's only fair that [because] so many of them have noise complaints and problems that they should bear the burden to increase noise awareness in the borough."

Addressing his own complaint that "people want to vent so they don't invent," Dallas is inviting Bronx residents to become members of the Campaign and help him to spread noise awareness among students, elected officials and ordinary citizens.

Dallas also wants more people involved because he admits he doesn't have all the answers to the noise problem. "What I'm really looking to do is to meet with people to develop more strategies," Dallas says. "I don't have all the answers. Like any movement, it needs new blood. It needs a transfusion of new ideas."

In relying too much on advocates like himself and on the police, Dallas says people are missing out on their most valuable asset in the battle -- themselves. While police can and should investigate and crack down on noise nuisances like nightclubs and businesses that blare stereos at all hours of the day and night, other problems are better solved by taking matters into one's own hands.

If someone is rudely honking their car horn outside your apartment, "open up your window and say something," he counsels. If you're bothered by a chronically noisy neighbor, get together with your fellow tenants who are likely to feel the same way and work on a solution.

Still, Dallas is not abandoning law enforcement officials nor are they abandoning him. Because he is so knowledgeable about noise laws and codes at every level of government, he is sought out by police officials to educate officers.

Lt. Richard Gribben, head of special operations at the 52nd Precinct, is something of a convert to Dallas' cause. He didn't make noise a priority until he started studying citizen complaints on the quality of life hotline, which he said were overwhelmingly about noise. Realizing that the "whole issue of noise isn't getting the play it should," Gribben, along with Captain Kenneth McGrath, has given new weight to the issue within the precinct. An April 28 memorandum from McGrath to all precinct officers states, "In cases where noise complaints are called into the telephone switchboard, it is imperative that a unit gets dispatched as soon as is feasible to address the complaint. Statements like 'we have no cars available,' or 'we have higher priorities to take care of,' are not acceptable."

Gribben, like Dallas -- and, partly because of Dallas, is looking to change the way people -- namely his officers -- view noise. We need "a sea change in the way [cops] think," he said at the town hall meeting.

If Gribben and other city and elected officials Dallas has enlightened on the issue are any guide, the Campaign is making serious inroads.

"I think that we've changed the way that elected officials and police and citizens think about noise," Dallas says. "We've given people a language for their struggle against noise, a whole ideology, a whole philosophy that people did not have before."

That certainly seems to be the case with Patricia Blau, a Fordham Bedford resident who attended Dallas' April town hall meeting on noise at the Mosholu Jewish Center."

You have to more than complain to solve noise pollution," Blau says. To help combat growing noise problems in her own building, she had a friend draw up a Calvin cartoon with the message, "Your floor is someone else's ceiling. "I want people to start thinking about solutions to this," Blau says.

Music to Dallas' ears, no doubt.

To join the Campaign, write to: John Dallas, Bronx Campaign for Peace and Quiet, 141 Marcy Place, Bronx, NY 10452.

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