KNOXVILLE — Barb Tidwell, 63, who has lived over a Gay Street frame shop for 22 years, let four visitors from Nashville into her second-floor apartment Thursday night to measure the noise, and asked on their way out whether one of them would close the window.
Nashville officials have been studying how Knoxville handles loud music and revving engines, after complaints about the area around Broadway, according to WBIR. Tidwell said the delegation came up the back stairs a little before 11 p.m. with a clipboard and a meter on a small tripod.
“I asked what they wanted me to do and the man said just go on like normal, so I watched my program,” she said. “Then the woman with the clipboard wanted to know what the city does about the noise, and I said I didn’t know that it does anything. I shut the window, mostly. In the summer I run a fan.”
The meter ran until nearly midnight. The highest reading came at 11:20, when a delivery truck backed up behind the frame shop. “There’s a truck that does that back there, and I told her so, and she wrote down the time,” Tidwell said. “I don’t know what else she wanted me to say about it.”
When the meter was packed up, the window stuck, so Tidwell asked the last one out to pull it down from the top, and he had to use both hands.