To the Ad Hoc Victory Field Committee,
The planners would do well to remember that Victory Field is in a valley between two hills that act like an amphitheater to reflect noise. Although I try to avoid the place, many of the disadvantages the Field produces make house calls.
Loudspeakers, the near constant battering of basketballs — these sounds jump the fence and penetrate solid walls. It’s loudest and worst for the immediate abutters but noise also travels uphill blocks away from the boundary.
The criticism made during the July 25th public meeting that some kind of noise abatement wall for the Marion Road abutters was “special treatment” to benefit “only a few” doesn’t hold water. Such a structure (assuming it would actually work) would be no more “special treatment” than the presence of the chain link fence to keep the basketballs out of the backyards. (And unless there’s ice on the court, basketball continues all year with no off-season.)
And as to why we neighbors choose to live near an athletic field if we don’t like the effects, let me enlarge on what someone else said at the same meeting. Most of us moved in before the latest round of added bells and whistles, and some of us well before the batch before that. Games as well as practices used to take place afternoons and weekends. No one had huge ranks of glaring lights aimed at their windows late into the night. There was noise but not as much and not as often. The taunt implies we shouldn’t continue to live where we had already settled, that we should endure all the disadvantages dumped on the neighborhood or be forced from our homes by the escalating problems with the Field. Such critics tend to live elsewhere and, once they finish playing, resume their lives away from the noise and glare.
And to sum up the situation with the current lights: they are too bright, too tall, too many, and are kept burning too late and too often.
Marilynne Roach
Marshall Street