The Hi-Fi Snore

Latest news on the thin-wall apartment front is snoring.

Sam Sheir lives on the 16th floor of No. 35 Seacoast Terrace, a brand-new building in Brooklyn, and its walls are very thin. When he goes to bed, his head is only a matter of millimeters from the head of Sam and Ida Gutwirth's double bed. And Sam Sheir snores. Not only does he snore--his snoring style was described at a hearing in Brooklyn Criminal Court last week as "of gigantic proportions, an animalistic roar, lionlike, that vibrates the rooms."

Sam Sheir's stentorian breathing was under discussion before a judge because snorer Sheir had haled Neighbor Gutwirth into court for repeatedly pounding on the wall to wake him, thereby making "unnecessary noise." Sheir claimed that his snoring, by contrast, is necessary noise. Gutwirth admits it. "What the hell," he says. "Snoring is like breathing, and how in the world are you going to ask somebody to stop giving it the old in-and-out? He can't help his snoring, but at least he can move his bed."

Mr. Gutwirth rented a sound-level meter and measured the lionlike snores of Mr. Sheir as they came through the wall. A newspaper reporter who auditioned the Sheir snore, live, felt that all this electronic gear was unnecessary because "even to the naked ear [it] sounded like a circular saw going through a pine knot."

Judge Matthew Pagan, who lives--quietly--in a substantially soundproof, 50-year-old brownstone and seems to feel that things have come to a pretty pass when a man can't snore the night away in his own bed without being afraid of waking the neighbors, suggested that both consult their landlord about what might be done to dampen the high fidelity of the Sheir snoring, and that everybody show up in court again next month.

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