The sound of gentrification is silence.
www.theatlantic.com
i can confirm that everyone in nyc has absolutly failed to keep the place quiet, it is noisy as fuck, mostly due to traffic, trucks, sirens, and because music just is played loud here in shops or whatever. there's a churros place near me that has a speaker outside and plays rap onto the street 24/7, even when its closed. some of the verizon shops do that too when they're open. construction often happens at night if its for roads and they do not fuck about, they do not give a shit if they are digging up your street with jackhammers at 7am. i don't think the gentrified areas are particularly quiet. the main distinction is between manhattan and the other boroughs i think. loads of the non-gentrified parts of town are quiet, coz they're pretty far from the action.
one non-gentrified part of manhattan tho, washington heights, is mostly dominican and i thought that the reputation it had for being 'loud' was some bullshit or other, but i stayed there for a couple of weeks and it was pretty much impossible to do an office job and live there. people would just crank up the volume to serious levels and leave it on until 5am on like a tuesday night. fair enough, i was the one who was out of place for sure (coz i wanted a cheap airbnb, which is to say, one where a room wasn't $200 a night). really fucking annoying to be around though if its new to you and if your livelihood requires you to sleep at predictable times. i was dying by the end, seriously sleep deprived.
seperately there's a super interesting thing going on in this genre of writing where 'the gentrifier' is a personage who you can give a good kicking to. it's a weird one coz its so often pretty elite people writing this stuff, who are also the genre of people from which the gentrifier tends to emerge. there's some kind of self-loathing thing there i think.