There’s no peace and quiet in Forest Hills.
Forest Hills Stadium was slapped with noise violations for 11 of its 36 summer concerts — as locals claim the ruckus has elderly residents ripping out their hearing aides.
Neighbors of the concert venue at the West Side Tennis Club are now making their own noise in court with multiple bitter lawsuits and accusations reverberations from the concerts are even tanking student academic performances and driving people from the otherwise sleepy enclave.
“It’s hard to explain what it feels like to have someone take away something that you’ve enjoyed for a long time, which is just peace in your own home and tranquility in your neighborhood,” said Andy Court, president of Concerned Citizens of Forest Hills. “It’s just wrong,”
The extreme noise has grown worse since concerts returned to the storied stadium a decade ago, especially as the number of concerts per summer series has skyrocketed each year, Court claimed.
The Department of Environmental Protection ruled that 11 of last season’s 36 concerts exceeded the 68-decibel noise limitations set for the open-air venue — up from seven violations that were issued the previous year.
And that’s not just for the stadium itself — each of the sound readings was taken inside Forest Hills residents’ homes.
The worst night was on June 15, when the Pixies and Modest Mouse delivered headache-inducing 73-decibel soundwaves through the neighborhood.
“The windows will shake continuously,” said Doug Gilbert, who has lived in a home bordering the tennis club for 30 years.
“You really can’t do anything inside the house during the concerts, particularly in all the rooms that are along that side of the house that face the stadium. With the windows vibrating the way they do, it’s just very hard to get anything done.”
The issue isn’t limited to the four hours that the concerts go for, but even throughout the day, Gilbert said. The 68-year-old has a perfect view of the famous and popular tennis courts — which are rapidly abandoned when the headliners kick off their sound checks.
There are two ongoing lawsuits by residents against the club, which runs the 13,000-seat landmark stadium.
One, brought forth by the Forest Hills Garden Corp, escalated on Tuesday — the homeowner’s group filed an injunction against the stadium operators to prohibit the club from licensing, authorizing, or allowing any concerts until a deal is brokered to make the 2025 concert season more peaceful.
Neighbor Marty Levinson, 84, has lived on Exeter Street since 1967 and said the noise emanating from the stadium has significantly increased since the days The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra and The Rolling Stones played their shows.
The noise levels are so bad that Levinson routinely removes his hearing aids to escape, a luxury he acknowledges his much younger neighbors cannot afford.
“This is a very quiet neighborhood generally,” Levinson said. “And with the influx of 13,000 people, every time there’s a concert, it changes the whole character and the atmosphere and the climate of the neighborhood.
“If you come here at any other time, even in the middle of the day or in the evening, it’s very, very quiet,” he went on. “But we can no longer sit on the little patio behind our house — we are put out by the noise.”
A distressed parent who lives on Clyde Street said her eighth-grade daughter’s grades tanked at the tail end of the 2023-24 school year because of the intense sound and vibrations rocking her home. She claims the reverberations are so strong that they have shaken their plants and caused cracks in the walls.
The teenager, who suffers from ADHD and anxiety, was an honors student and was on track to be accepted into an accelerated high school, her mother said — until the concerts kicked off last spring.
“She cannot study if there’s any distractions,” the distraught mom, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “So there’s a conflict going on. It’s not just the noise, but the vibrations. It affects her.
“High school applications for seventh-grade grades are the ones that count towards whether or not you can apply to screened schools,” she added. “One night, she was trying to study but because of the shows, she bombed the test. She got like a 60%. I was livid.
She blamed the noise issue for her daughter’s plummeting GPA and said she would not be able to apply to some of her goal schools as a result.
“So this took away opportunities for her,” she said. “And that’s why we are really angry about the whole thing.”
The club, meanwhile, claimed that the complaints and ongoing lawsuits are nothing more than attempts by the FHGC and its president Anthony Oprisiu to wrangle “control and power” — especially since the stadium has diligently shut down its operations by 10 p.m.
“Forest Hills Gardens Corporation under the leadership of Anthony Oprisiu is on a mission to kill this icon and end 101 years of tradition and cultural and economic contributions,” Akiva Shapiro of Gibson Dunn, counsel to the West Side Tennis Club, told The Post in a statement. “In the 2024 season, the Stadium held 36 shows all of which ended at or before 10 p.m.
“Considering the approximate population of Forest Hills of 70,000 residents, the percentage of people complaining is well under one-thousandth of a percent,” the statement went on.
“Those complaints all come from a militant few within the Gardens Corp. and their confederates with the goal of manufacturing violations now that the lion’s share of their legal arguments were thrown out of court. The violations are unadjudicated and we expect will be dismissed.”
