The hottest story of Wednesday morning—for those who dutifully ignore Kardashian-adjacent gossip, at the very least—was that a single Brooklyn couple had racked up a whopping 5 percent of the 133 sex-related noise complaints made in the last year, citywide, gracing our newsfeeds thanks to a FOIA request by DNAinfo.
Of course, a million Tweeters sighed. Of course it was the hipster hellhole of Brooklyn—which did pull in a third of all complaints citywide.
But Bay Ridge is a Brooklyn that’s faded from Park Slope and Crown Heights and is now fading from its last vestiges in the borough’s south end.
Home to the borough’s sole Republican state senator (hello, Marty Golden), the streets of Bay Ridge are not the kind of place where tattooed, bearded 20-somethings invite their one night stands for noisy, drug-fueled sex after the bars close in the wee morning. Always a mix of working immigrant families, it’s seen a surge in Arab residents in recent years with a good dosage of Greeks, Irish, Italians, and ex-Soviets, as well as one of the highest concentrations of those coveted Brooklyn accents that most of the borough’s newer residents have never encountered in real life.
Unfortunately, that, too, is changing. While Bay Ridge home prices are still, on average, half of what people see in Williamsburg or Park Slope, rents are jumping by the double digits. Those priced out by the ever-growing luxury buildings a stone’s throw from Manhattan are moving south.
Fortunately, the story of loud, noisy, neighbor-irritating sex is still solidly old-Brooklyn. The culprits? A 30-something Dominican woman living at 7201 Ridge Blvd., and her 25-year-old boyfriend of two years who doubles as the building’s handyman. (Or as we used to call them: her super.)
“I don’t think it’s true,” said the unnamed, paint-splattered male offender, when confronted by the Daily Mail. “Other people make louder noises. Everyone has their own way. I sometimes stomp my feet to make them quiet down.” Most of those neighbors, though, probably aren’t waking up the whole building at 4:40 in the morning in a family-heavy neighborhood.
The noises from within the apartment are somehow unsettling to enough local residents that they topped the list of upset neighbors, though residents reached by phone told The Daily Beast they knew nothing of the noisy sex monsters. (Perhaps those bothered were waiting on repairs for a leaky kitchen sink.) Cops supposedly dispatched to the scene couldn’t get close enough to the crime to get the full auditory benefits.
Or perhaps they just got there too late. A college student neighbor said that while the acoustics may have been Hollywood-worthy, marathon sex sessions these were not.
But for the handyman, the more the merrier: “I wouldn't mind if the people next door were doing the same!” he said.
He may get his wish soon enough, when the amorous couple will be just another indistinguishable moaning noise in a sea of oversexed new transplants (provided they don’t get priced out). At least for now, though, Gawker posts soliciting loud sex confessions from the heart of Brooklyn will still go unanswered.