It's Just The Noise -- The Travails Of Boots and Saddle

In today's Manhattan, you can be as gay or transgender as you need to be. Just don't make noise while doing it.

Consider Boots & Saddle. The hole-in-the-wall tavern featuring drag-strip shows and karaoke has been a Christopher Street fixture for 40 years.

Business is fine - but the rent is getting too damned high. The landlord wants to double the $12,000 monthly take, says co-owner Robert Ziegler. Boots must close, or move.

But nobody wants a bar that stays open 'til 4 - especially one that depends on loud entertainment. As more and more late-night bars have popped up to serve tourists and students, if there is a place that works, it's already taken.

Last week, Boots failed on its second try to find a new home. The Village community board voted against a liquor license for Morton Street and 7th Avenue South, a couple of blocks away from the bar's current spot.

Boots merits sympathy. Its bar employs 10 full-timers and gives 21 drag queens a chance to make performance-art livings.

It's also part of what makes the Village the Village. "We've had people from 103 countries," Ziegler says.

It's a small business, too. Ziegler started as a bartender 15 years ago. Co-owner Ron Silver needs the money to care for his grandson.

But a small business is unattractive to a landlord who can rent to a CVS, a Starbucks or an Occitane - all among the bar's new-ish neighbors.

"We've looked at a lot of spaces," Silver told a community-board member who suggested he try elsewhere. "It's getting more and more difficult. Famous places are going out of business."

Boots supporters have spun neighbors' opposition as homophobia. A Morton Street Block Association rep answers, "We elected not one but two gay presidents in succession. Please do not accuse [us] of homophobia."

What locals fear is noise.

Boots wanted to fit itself into a Plexiglass sidewalk caf off Morton a caf that sits below five condos and is next to a 32-unit apartment house.

As Carter Booth, co-chair of the liquor-license committee, told Boots' owners, "you're not going to be a restaurant" like the last tenant, a Chinese place that closed at midnight. "You're closing at 4 a.m. That's a pretty big change."

Velvet Abashian, who has lived in a condo above the space for 25 years, voiced her neighbors' "strong opposition. Even at low levels, sound penetrates the residential walls and floors."

And Bev Waldman, who owns the building next door, said noise would make "living conditions unbearable."

It's easy to dismiss these folk as paranoid complainers. Except that there's a reason armies use loud music as a torture device.

Noise will make your life hell - and New Yorkers complain about noise more than about anything else. Boots' address has garnered 42 complaints via 311 in 3 years -nearly all about "loud music."

But the city is better at collecting complaints than investigating them. Any veteran New Yorker knows the time to shut noise down is before it starts.

It's easy, too, to dismiss complainers as rich folk - and they don't help themselves by waxing on about their "enclave." But they're only "rich" because they bought or rented decades ago. Newcomers don't show up at meetings - they're too busy working so they can pay the rent.

Then there's the argument to end all argument: "If you don't like it, don't live in the Village."

That comment comes from the same type of people who think subway acrobats are a fun feature of the transit system - people who don't live here, or who haven't for very long.

It's a myth - held by out-of-towners - that New York is an anything-goes town of relentless noise and debauchery. Most of the time, most of Manhattan is remarkably quiet - and the noisemakers are tourists, not locals.

It matters, too, whether you chose to live on Christopher Street or on Morton Street - even half a block can make a big difference.

So here's hoping Boots finds a new home - but here's predicting it will have a hard time as long as it's up against people who are poor and rich, old and young, gay and straight - but are united in their demand for a good night's sleep.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post