GREENWICH VILLAGE — The drummers of Washington Square Park may have played their last beat.
Complaints from Village residents and folk musicians who perform in the park have prompted the local community board to renew a longstanding discussion on how to ameliorate noise issues.
And the drummers who perform in the park are a primary target, according to the New York Post.
The issue of noise in the park has been discussed at Community Board 2 meetings on and off since last July, when the board passed a resolution asking the Parks Department to come up with some ideas to remedy the frustrations of residents and other musicians who say they're being drowned — or drummed — out.
CB 2 Chair Tobi Bergman insisted the community board has no specific plans or intentions yet.
"We’re going to wait and see what people think," Bergman said.
"It’s not something we’re going into knowing what the solution is."
But some Washington Square Park advocates worry that the area could see a repeat of the "crackdown" on performers that caused public outcry a few years ago, when the Parks Department ticketed musicians for playing there.
"It could lead to being a slippery slope of more stringent rules being put in place that no one really wants," said Cathryn Swan, who runs a blog about the park and the conservancy that manages it.
Swan said she worries about the park's musical culture becoming homogenized or sanitized, compromising "the atmosphere that people expect from Washington Square Park, which is something very unique."
"It just seems to me that when someone says no drums or no this or no that, it just leads to questions of how that could be used down the road," Swan said.
"A lot of parks don’t have the musical history that we have."
At a board meeting in February, Parks officials talked about training Parks Enforcement Patrol officers to use decibel meters to measure the noise levels in the park. But Swan said it seems that nothing ever came of that idea.
"It was talked about at length but it never happened," said Swan.
"That would be a way to address people’s concerns in a way that doesn’t clamp down on the musicians as long as they’re within a certain sound level."
The board is devoting part of its Parks Committee meeting Wednesday night to hearing public comment regarding Washington Square Park. The meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. and will be held at the NYU Silver Center at 32 Waverly Place in Room 208.
"We want to hear ideas and see if there’s people in the park who support some changes," Bergman said, adding that he's hoping the discussion will be more productive than dramatic.
"We don’t want a big to-do about this," he added. "We’ve had that before where everyone gets excited and nothing happens."
Bergman said he believed some Parks officials would be in attendance but that he didn't think they were planning on presenting anything.
A Parks spokesman said that the process of making changes to Washington Square Park is still in the very early stages, and that the agency is letting CB 2 lead the way.
"NYC Parks looks forward to working with Community Board 2 to address unreasonable noise complaints in Washington Square Park," the spokesman said.
