It’s Thursday night, and time is ticking towards the early hours of morning. As you adjust the book light on your textbook, begging the chapter to end, your ears prick up, for the noise outside has been increasing as steadily as your focus has been dwindling. Approaching the window, a familiar scene awaits you: an enormous throng of bodycon dresses and pressed khaki pants is writhing outside the door of a hidden club, where bouncers are pushing the crowd into the street to keep them from vomiting too close to the entrance. The shrill laughs and brawny shouts have been inhibiting your study progress and sleeping schedule since move-in day — that is, on the nights you opted out of rowdy adventures and chose to stay in.
These scenes have come to be expected on Wednesday through Sunday nights around the SoHo area and have begun to draw much negative attention from nearby residents. The tense discourse between SoHo-dwellers and the owners of these bars over the latter’s unmanageable noise pollution has grown to include students in Broome Street residence hall, an NYU dorm that sits right in the center of a sea of bars and clubs — making it a prime location not only for access to riotous nightlife, but also for a potential shift in the emerging discussion about future regulations of these establishments.
Last week, the Manhattan Community Board No. 2 sent an email to residents of the Broome Community as an invitation for students to attend their next meeting where they will be planning how to restore an appropriate level of peace to the neighborhood. The culprits identified included bars that had recently opened nightclub extensions, like the notorious Brinkley’s and Southside Night Club establishment, which was questionably granted a license as an additional bar by the New York State Liquor Authority, despite the fact that Brinkley’s is meant to operate as a restaurant. By looking at discrepancies such as these, the board hopes to deny renewal of their licenses, or at the very least implement minor changes, such as limiting the hours of operation, to reduce disturbances — a feat they want NYU students to help achieve.
As mid-semester stress settles in, it is no surprise that students are trading in their heels for slippers as they hunker down and study. This withdrawal from participation in nightlife has not gone unnoticed as the board has made an obvious attempt to draft these hibernating students into an attack on the very enterprises once considered ample stomping ground for a night out. This potential partnership is ironic, to say the least, especially considering that the hooligans described and photographed by the board resemble the very college students they are now imploring to aid them in their cause.
The board is trying to take advantage of the lull in collegiate nighttime adventures to dismantle the very sites that, just a few weeks ago, had been polluted by these same students. But NYU, which is “in and of the city,” is a school immersed in a sleepless culture that students either love or hate depending on the day of the week. Being a college student does not entitle us to strip SoHo of the boisterous spirit that both aggravates and attracts us. For students to use the privilege of attending NYU as permission to engage in a duplicitous condemnation of institutions we seek out on Saturday nights would only foster hypocrisy.
A version of this article appeared in the Thursday, Oct. 11 print edition. Sasha Leshner is a contributing columnist. Email her at [email protected].
