The past two winters, millions of Americans, including myself, spent time in Mexico. We flocked to its capital city in particular, and there we listened to urban life anew. In towns, or pueblos, women fire up the speaker system to make announcements about lost dogs or freshly laid eggs for sale. In cities, machismos blast a pre-recorded audio of a 10-year-old girl asking for scrap metal from pickup trucks loaded with broken appliances. On the beach, vendors list off beverage names with innovative cadence. I called friends in Cairo and Istanbul, and through the phone, I heard the cacophony of vendor-dominated street life in their cities. When I returned to mine – Brooklyn, New York – I was struck by the absence of the seller’s voice. In the U.S. this kind of cooptation of public sound space is stigmatized and criminalized. While societies deserve sonic experiences uncluttered by capitalism, western bans on oral advertising practices stifle something else: cross-cultural, cross-class interactions that make us feel like we’re a part of a whole.

In September 1877, Harper’s Magazine published a diatribe against vendors’ cries. “We all know that many wearisome noises are inseparable from life in a great metropolis like New York. The incessant rumbling of carts, carriages, cars, and stages must be endured until some acceptable substitute is found for our stony pavements. But why should we endure the additional misery of unceasing and discordant vociferations from hoarse hucksters?”

I imagine the bitter journalist was coming off a summer of noise, the season that inspires people to blast their music a little bit louder, stay talking on the stoop a little later, and generally exist out in public spaces less inhibited.

A century ago, the soundscape of public life in almost every city was punctuated by the voices of “hucksters.” The earliest form of oral advertising was bamboo flutes played to sell candy in ancient China. During the Middle Ages in England, town criers were popular, as most people were illiterate. As industrialization spread globally, brick-and-mortars never totally replaced the perambulatory seller, whose position on the margins allows for lower prices (made even lower by haggling) and ad-hoc conversation. To make their offering known, they must make noise and often employ pitch, repetition, and rhythm to make it a signature one. Governments have been whittling away street vendors’ prevalence by making their noise illegal, New York being a prime example.

The city’s first comprehensive noise code was passed in the 1930s, and updated in the 1970s when the federal government enacted its own policy. Kate Wagner notes that these early laws targeted the behavior of private citizens rather than systemic urban problems. “The right to silence is a kind of aesthetic moralism, tied up with appeals to public well-being, justice, democracy, and, more recently, sustainability,” she writes. “The fight for silence is often, in reality, a fight for power and control.

The Harper's article from 1877 was related not just to summertime but to a new Brooklyn noise ordinance: any person engaged in buying or selling any goods was forbidden to use a bell, under penalty of ten dollars – which would be just under $300 today. $350 is the minimum fine that current ice cream truck owners receive if they are reported for playing music when stopped, per NYC 311; the maximum is $3,000.

As has come to be expected whenever people are “calling to make a complaint,” crackdowns on the sound of commerce are directly linked to NIMBYism, gentrification, and occupation. In the case of a Harlem Mister Softee dispute, a neighborhood transplant repeatedly reported a parked truck for jingling. Longtime residents were baffled: “[Noise] is the heartbeat of Harlem,” they told Gothamist. “We hate it, but that's how it is.”

Yet according to 311 data, ice cream trucks are the culprit for less than 1% of noise complaints. They have nothing on loud music and parties, banging, off-hours construction, or car horns. Neither do their decibel levels. The legal crackdown is less about citizens’ interests and instead another way to over-police immigrants, homeless people, and other people living and working precariously. In summer 2021, vendors transformed Corona Plaza in Queens into a big, popular, open-air market that even the New York Times likened to Mexico. By August, city inspectors rolled through to pass out fines.

The pandemic briefly offered opportunities for unsanctioned uses of common space, until the city overcorrected. To counter population decline and a flurry of “New York is dead” articles, officials declared a “beautification” of the streets. Homelessness is at its highest levels since the Great Depression, and new mayor Eric Adams is responding with mass sweeps. According to data obtained by NPR, the city carried out 733 “cleanups” of encampments from March 18 to May 1.

So there is a great irony in the American fetishization of bazaars and markets integral to Middle Eastern, South Asian, Central, and South American social life (do you know a single Bohemian type who doesn’t own earthenware pottery or linen pants they scored “at the market”?). It seems to suggest that noisiness and chaos is okay there, but here we expect or think we deserve a degree of peace and quiet.

Similar to Wagner’s description of silence as aesthetic moralism, the relegation of commerce to exclusively official avenues is an indicator of “right” and “wrong” ways to buy and sell. The individual operating outside of a larger entity, and the voice they use to do so, are villainized under hypercapitalism, because what corporation does a homemade Hennessey nutcracker serve? Noise is inextricable from race and criminalizing the sounds of majority Black and brown neighborhoods is a warning sign: someone wants that real estate. Keeping it noisy might act like a protective sound barrier against displacement, against “the heartbeat of Harlem” going into cardiac arrest.

To those claiming to just want more breathing room, I say we don’t even have it. Advertising factors massively into New Yorkers’ experience of common spaces, but it’s largely a visual relationship. The most popular forms of “out of home” advertising by far are billboards and posters. Whether a sign over the West Side Highway blocking the horizon or an album release date spray-painted on a sidewalk in Bushwick, the surfaces of civic space become a tool to promote corporate interests. Meanwhile, the street seller’s mode of advertising can be a spontaneous confrontation with another individual.

“It is simplistic and inaccurate to assume that bourgeois opinions on street cries [are] unanimously antagonistic or indifferent, despite what new or old laws might say,” researcher Jayeeta Sharma alleges in the Food, Culture & Society journal. “A popular guidebook of the 1870s described vendors and their cries as among the enjoyable sights and sounds of New York City that crossed class lines. ‘The rich and the poor buy of them. The strolling vagrant picks up his scanty breakfast at one of these stands, and the millionaire buys an apple at another.’”

The initial appeal of New York was an American city where people hung out on the street and in the park. It was a place to buy struggle rapper mixtapes or churros on the subway – I never did learn to drive, after all. The point at which we must burrow our AirPods deeper in our eardrums when someone offers cold water on a hot day is the mark of a failing commons.

Recently I declined a man selling “ice-cold nutcrackers” out of a cooler in a park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, but I asked how his day was. Was his voice tired? We had heard him making rounds all afternoon. He looked at my friends and me, who hadn’t stopped gabbing since we spread out our blanket, and the bottle of wine in between us. He replied, “I’m just talking to people, just like you!”