I’m totally in sympathy with Diane in the Hyde Park area since this particular issue pushes a real hot button with me. Most people are very, very tolerant of special events and a certain amount of noise; it’s the price you pay living close to downtown in an urban neighborhood. BUT when you find that your driveway is continually blocked, that you can’t make it down your alley to reach your garage and have to park half a mile away (a real hardship for seniors & disabled), that your yard is being thrashed, trampled and pissed upon by trespassers, and that you can’t get away from the noise even with the windows SHUT, the intrusion is no longer tolerable.

I speak from experience; I live in the so-called “shadow of the Bronco stadium”.

The noise from events at the Stadium is not intrusive at all; it creates a certain amount of excitement and vibrancy in the air around the neighborhood. Listening to music wafting on the area from JD park is also energetic and I imagine listening to the festivities at Hyde Park is much the same way. The problem is the behavour of some of the people who attend these events.

It is illegal to block a driveway or an alley; it’s illegal to park within 30 feet of a stop sign or 20 feet from an intersection because it impedes vision and prevents firetrucks from turning through an intersection (Yeah Jeff, you obviously don’t remember that tidbit of info from Driver’s Ed–do you expect the City to make signs for every possible driving infraction?). It’s illegal to trespass on people’s yards and trample their yards, it’s ilegal to urinate in the street or on someone’s yard, it’s illegal to stagger down the street at 2am and sing at the top of your lungs, and it’s illegal to make so much noise that neighbors can hear it inside their house, no matter what time of day.

The occasional disturbance of this caliber isn’t going to faze me or my neighbors. But with the amount of people that these events draw in, it’s not just an occasional person breaking the law but hundreds…hundreds of cars blocking intersections can choke traffic through the neighborhood and hundreds of drunks can do a lot of damage and make a helluva lot of noise at 2 or 3AM.
No matter where a person lives, anarchic behaviour is unacceptable. Unfortunately, the only solution is a strong police presence in the impact areas which needs to be standard procedure for all events of this caliber.