Breachers of the Peace

When I moved to New York, I left behind my small central Pennsylvania hometown for Astoria, which is as close to bucolic as it gets in Gotham. Since moving, I’ve taken up running: I go to new neighborhoods, size up nearby Greek restaurants, and find forgotten pockets of northwest Queens. I usually end my runs in Astoria Park, which sometimes reminds me of home—trading the Susquehanna for the East River, the Blue Mountain Ridge for the Manhattan skyline. It’s one of the things that made the transition tolerable.

Still, everywhere has its annoyances, and Astoria is one of many New York neighborhoods beset since the pandemic by noise from drag racers and dirt bikes, which can sometimes make one long for leaf blowers—that scourge of suburbia. (See “The Gotham Cacophony,” Autumn 2021.) Organizing their meet-ups online, the racers constitute a discrete subculture. A former participant in New York’s drag-racing scene told me in an online message that a meet-up some years ago was “one of the best days of my life.” But of all hobbies, it’s one of the more antisocial.

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