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Park Slope residents claim that Fourth Avenue’s sky-high Vue Restaurant and Lounge isn’t just on the roof — its noise levels are through it!
Neighbors say that noise coming from the bar atop Hotel Le Bleu is keeping them up past 2 am as often as four nights a week.
“There’s the music, but you can also hear the crowd up there, yelling and screaming and singing,” said Steve Shepard, who has lived near the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fifth Street for five years.
Over that time, Shepard said he has grown accustomed to roaring truck traffic on Fourth Avenue, but said that the “disco and house music” is “much more noticeable than the traffic, which on a normal night is a steady white noise.”
When the rooftop bar — replete with panoramic views and flashing LED lights — opened this August, it was the first of its kind in a formerly industrial Park Slope corridor where businesses never had to worry about noise complaints. As a result, early reviews of the Vue were favorable, including one from Brooklyn Paper Señor Editor Vince DiMiceli, who dubbed it a “game changer for Brooklyn.”
“Everything that you thought was, now isn’t. Everything that you wish could have been, has now become,” he said.
Game changer or not, the bar has got to shush, according to Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman.
“People have had their lives disrupted by the noise there,” he said. “We need to see some change very quickly.”
Domenic Tonaccio — the landlord for both Hotel Le Bleu and the Vue Restaurant — told The Brooklyn Paper that he hopes to make those changes within two weeks.
“I don’t want to have a problem with my neighbors,” said Tonaccio, who added that workers will completely soundproof and enclose the rooftop venue. “We’re doing everything possible to make sure that we’re not getting any complaints from neighbors and that we’re not getting complaints from hotel guests.”
But neighbors doubt that soundproofing can effectively muffle an outdoor space.
“I don’t know how they expect it will help at all. It’s just a roof with open walls,” said Shepard. “It might shelter the patrons from rain, but it doesn’t do anything with noise.”
©2009 Community Newspaper Group
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