The Daily Free Press opines that the residents in Brookline have resorted to involving the Brookline police without talking to the students first ("Student residents need respect," Oct. 17, p. 7). Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of us have repeatedly attempted to talk to students, but have been met, for the most part, with a stone wall. We then have called the cops.
A neighbor of mine went out to try to get drunken students to stop urinating into the shrubbery by his first-floor unit's bedroom windows (where his grade-school-age daughters' rooms are located) on a Super Bowl Sunday a couple of years back. He nearly got physically assaulted for his trouble.
Last August, I tried to inform summer school students residing on Pleasant Street (right across the street from my bedroom window) who were about to have a keg party about town regulations concerning noise. In return for my efforts, I got a drunken rooftop concert with guitar and bongo drums and a loud audience at 12:30 a.m. Of course, I called the cops.
I've had problems like this since we moved here in 2003 and at an increasing frequency since. When I first moved to Boston in 1980, I lived on Glenville Avenue in Allston. The noise in my part of Brookline as of the last year or so has grown comparable to what I experienced in Allston -- but Brookline is a higher-end community renowned for its quality of life (libraries, schools, town services such as the police). The residents, renters and owners alike all pay a markup for this. Every property owner is entitled to the quiet enjoyment of his or her property. The students haven't allowed us that, and they seem to listen to the Brookline police more readily than they listen to their neighbors.
John Shreffler
Brookline
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