Why in My Backyard?

IHAD a job last year sorting articles for a sociologist who was writing a book on New York City. My mission was to read newspaper articles and then put them in manila folders with labels like "Homelessness," "Ethnicity" and "Transportation." Although most of my folders had straightforward labels, one of them was mysteriously marked "NIMBY."

NIMBY means "Not In My Back Yard." Into this folder went articles about neighborhood groups that didn't want sewage treatment plants constructed near their beautiful houses, or families who objected to proposals for homeless shelters next door.

All last year, sitting in the seminar room where I worked, I thought of the NIMBY folder as the narrow-minded folder. All these people were protesting against what everyone agreed were necessities. They just didn't want to have to be personally involved. "Please solve society's problems," seemed to be the attitude. "Just do it where I don't have to see."

This year I have a new perspective on the NIMBY phenomenon. I live in Quincy House, and my bedroom looks directly not the Dewolfe Street construction site, where Harvard Real Estate is building two five-story structures eventually to house University affiliates. Sure, Harvard could use the housing space; but frankly, I'm sick of the noise, and I wish it weren't in my back yard.

THE work begins in earnest each morning at 8 a.m., which is before I--and most other undergraduates--wake up. For the first several weeks, the construction was tolerable. The workers merely moved dirt around all day. The only noise was the ceaseless beeping made by the backhoes as they backed up.

That beeping is pretty loud, and it's not exactly pleasant. But with a lot of concentration, I was able to think of it as musical. After a couple of weeks, I had gotten to the point where, instead of dreaming about screeching hawks, I was dreaming about ice cream trucks. Given a few more weeks, I'm sure I would have dreamt about choirs, or even singing angels.

Unfortunately, the first phase of construction ceded to the second without much warning. The job suddenly got serious. They started driving steel piles into the ground with a giant hammering machine that utilizes both explosives and a falling weight.

This machine is not musical by any stretch of the imagination. It bangs, bangs, bangs. No tones. It bangs with such force that Quincy House shakes with each drop of the weight. I can feel the vibrations. They aren't gentle.

My dreams have become violent. In them, people are always beating me over the head. I'm afraid that next week I'll start beating them back.

Like an unpleasant alarm, the banging eventually wakes me up. Unlike an unpleasant alarm, the banging doesn't disappear with the flip of a switch. It keeps going all day.

It's affecting my academic work. At first I noticed that I was using the word "construction" a lot in my papers, but it's gotten worse than that by now. Every book I read seems to be arguing its point vehemently, stressing every third word as if the world depended on it.

The problem is that I believe everything I read now. This was never a problem before.

LIFE near a construction site is not without its rewards. I have enjoyed playing detective to figure exactly how the pile driver works and, for that matter, figuring out what the piles are for.

There is a certain pleasure in noting the progress being made every day, in seeing the entire former parking lot slowly but steadily ringed with steel piles.

There is a sort of poetry in absorbing the details of the construction process. Many a day have I laid aside my books and stared intensely at the backhoes, as they scoop dirt up, swivel around, dump it elsewhere and pat it down. This is an immense improvement over watching the cars that sat stationary in the lot all day, which was the only distraction my window provided before the construction began.

As long as I'm looking for the silver lining, I may as well also mention that I'd rather be inside Quincy House being shaken all to hell than outside all winter doing the shaking.

Still, though, in spite of all the fringe benefits, the noise is driving me crazy! Why couldn't these buildings go up in the middle of the Yard, or at the Quad, or on the Boston Common? Why in my back yard?