Noise: A Part of Living in Hoboken (or any urban environment)
Living in Hoboken is noisy. It’s a fact of life with urban living, especially when you have 40,000 people crammed into one square mile. And that’s without counting all the out-of-towners who descend on the Hoboken bar scene on weekends.
You have basically three types of noise: street, horizontal, and vertical. The closer you are to Washington Street, the more street noise you have to contend with. It also depends on where your property faces (rooms facing the street hear a lot more). Horizontal noise comes from shared walls and hallways. My current four-bedroom has no shared walls thanks to ingenious courtyard cutouts in the exterior walls, so I hear nothing on a horizontal level unless I am sitting right next to one of the exterior doors (pretty infrequent in a 2,000 square foot apartment). Vertical noise depends on building construction and your neighbors. Steel/concrete construction helps diminish but not entirely eliminate vertical noise.
And the obvious answer, living on the top floor, is also fraught with peril because while you may not have neighbors above you, you do have the roof overhead. Roofs are notorious for leaking, especially in new construction.
People always seem to think there is some magical noise-free solution out there, and there isn’t. I grew up in a detached house on a quiet, leafy street, and I often slept with my pillow over my head. I could hear the garbage pickup in the middle of the night, jackhammers working on interminable street repairs (seriously, I have never seen such frequent street repairs anywhere outside of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn), neighbors fighting two doors down, crickets and birds chirping, gas-powered leaf blowers. Not to mention my kid brother jumping off his bed in his room right above the kitchen where I was trying to do homework.
When it comes to noise, you have to pick your poison. There is no ideal solution unless you plan on spending massive amounts on soundproofing, and even then there is no guarantee that you will never hear anything. Owner-occupied buildings tend to be quieter than rentals. As long as you have considerate neighbors, you will be all right re. noise.
