Ms. Bronzaft is an environmental psychologist. "I look at the effects of the environment on people's health," she said.
For decades, few things have absorbed Ms. Bronzaft more than the perils of noise, which can harm a person's physical well-being even beyond potential hearing loss. She has advised mayors and subway administrators. Six years ago, she helped revise New York City's noise code.
"People use the phrase, 'I get used to it — I walk the streets and I get used to the noise,' " Ms. Bronzaft said. "It means you've adapted to the noise. When you're dealing with something, you're using energy to cope with the situation. Guess what? That's wear and tear on your body. So when you hear someone say, 'I'm dealing with it,' I say, 'Yes, but at what cost?' "
Dresner's, around the corner from her apartment, is an Upper East Side veteran that describes itself as "the Irish pub with the German name." On this day, it turned out to be not as quiet as hoped. A large group had settled in, and it was loud. That forced a retreat to the restaurant's partially enclosed sidewalk space, where diners had to contend only with the throb of idling delivery trucks and the roar of passing motorcycles.
Ms. Bronzaft, 77, rose to the occasion. So did her voice, which, she acknowledged, can be formidable. "When I speak at conferences," she said, "I don't use mikes."
The reason for the meal was, predictably, to talk about din and the city. While hardly new, the subject has recently drawn a fair amount of newspaper attention. "All of a sudden, noise is hot," Ms. Bronzaft said.
Conspicuously, however, not in the race for mayor. Though unbearable noise has long been New Yorkers' No. 1 quality-of-life complaint — roughly since Henry Hudson dropped anchor, it sometimes seems — it has produced barely a whisper in this campaign. An issue like horse-drawn carriages manages to stir passions far more intensely.
"What I would like to say to these mayoral candidates is that noise gives you clues about how your system is operating," Ms. Bronzaft said. She added: "People say that to correct noise you have to spend money. To which I say, by not correcting noise, you're going to spend more money. Education? Loss in learning. Health? Aren't health costs one of the major costs of this country? Noise affects health."
Conversation mattered more at this lunch than the meal itself. Ms. Bronzaft, a woman of slight build, ordered a Buffalo chicken salad. She then picked slowly at it, prompting her interviewer to channel his mother and to plead every now and then: Please, eat. She drank only water. The interviewer had a Caesar salad with chicken, washed down with club soda, followed by coffee.
An inevitable question came early: What is it about noise that first intrigued her?
Ms. Bronzaft harked back to the early 1970s, when Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed her to an advisory group on transportation. She was then living in Flatbush, Brooklyn, while teaching psychology at Herbert H. Lehman College, in the northern reaches of the Bronx. Her round-trip commute was well over three hours. "He felt someone who traveled that much on the subway would be a wonderful appointment," she said.
Around that time, someone suggested that she examine an elementary school near elevated tracks of the No. 1 line in Inwood, at Manhattan's northern tip. Some students there were lagging in their studies. What Ms. Bronzaft found, in a widely publicized 1975 study, was that children in classrooms facing the tracks performed far worse than those on the other side of the building, the quieter side.
"Not only were the trains disruptive, the teacher had to stop teaching," Ms. Bronzaft recalled. "Teachers stopped about 11 percent of the time."
"Bottom line: By the sixth grade, the children were nearly a year behind those on the quiet side," she said.
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