Listening to My Neighbors Fight

At 11:15 p.m. on a recent weeknight, I was turning off the lights in my apartment to start winding down for sleep when I heard yelling from upstairs. It was different from the sound of the children who live directly overhead playing, being rambunctious, stomping around, being annoying. These were angry voices. I was in pajamas, but I opened my front door so I could hear more clearly, and I was greeted with a flurry of f-bombs. There I was in my hallway, doing a cost/benefit analysis of intervention—a familiar position.

I've lived in a wide variety of apartments in New York City over the past 20 years, but a sad through line, from the jam-packed railroad apartment I shared with three roommates in Hell’s Kitchen to my current home where I live with my husband and dog in Boerum Hill, has been overhearing neighbors fighting. A vicious fact about living in New York City is that, except for the Russian oligarchs who rent huge apartments but never seem to occupy them, we are all crammed in here. We mass commute. We have few personal spaces and little privacy. We live with a built-in audience. I have cried on subways and streets and in