Noise alone, even of families fleeing other slums, drove residents out in waves

Evidence

More people moved out of the buildings bordering the expressway. Some of the vacancies were filled by the type of family that would have filled them in the days before there was an expressway, for there were still tens of thousands of Jewish families in New York struggling to get out of the Lower East Side and other slums. But, with the noise, most moved out again—as fast as they could. And the families that replaced them were the families from the other side of the park. Muggings increased, and there began to be reports of robberies, thieves breaking right into your home. Before long, the old residents of the 3,000 apartments bordering the expressway were gone, moved away. Then the residents of the apartments next to those began to move, and then the residents of the apartments next to those. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3721

Categorization

• XREF: The domino of vacancy rippling outward from a noise source is a clean spatial mechanism, connectable to the reader’s work on soundscapes and to geographies of white flight.