If you had to explain to a child what it would sound like if he traveled back in time to the 1920s, what would you say? What would stand out to us now? What would we hear?
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TRANSCRIPT: One of the interesting things that really hit home to me when I saw the visual evidence on the newsreels was the mixture of old sounds and new that characterized New York City at this time. So automobile traffic, the internal combustion engine, trucks and cars, are really still quite new and they’re just taking over the streets at this time. And cars didn’t typically have mufflers back then, so this is an incredibly new force of noise. Yet at the same time you see on the news reels horses and carts still lumbering down the street and they made noise too. But this mixture of transportation systems that had been around for centuries and these brand new modern technologies is really quite striking and I think it must have been very unsettling to people who were living through this transition.
If you were on a street like Cortland Street, which was known as Radio Row, down in Lower Manhattan, all of the shops there were advertising radios and phonographs — and for awhile, they mounted loudspeakers outside their shop windows and simply broadcast their wares out into the streets. So as you walked down the street you would just hear one radio program after another as you walked from one shop to the next. And this was considered to be one of the noisiest places in New York.
This is a time where there are elevated trains rumbling overhead throughout the city, and at the same time they’re interested in replacing those elevated trains with subways. So they’re excavating, they’re digging trenches, they’re using dynamite to blow up the ground to ultimately bury those trains into subway systems. So you’ve kind of got it above and below ground coming at you from all sides at once. It must have been incredibly exciting but I think it really was incredibly noisy too.
