As Concerts Return to Forest Hills Stadium, So Do Complaints

Before the music came back, most people in the brick townhouses and apartment buildings of Forest Hills didn’t give much thought to the crumbling, steel-and-concrete Romanesque stadium abandoned by the United States Open 37 years ago.

Its $120,000-a-year taxes, waist-high weeds and colony of feral cats were headaches for its owners, the West Side Tennis Club.

But rock shows have returned to the Forest Hills Stadium, with window-rattling sounds that pierce the neighborhood’s calm. Some people have simply left home at performance time. Others hunker down and console weary toddlers, put off homework or S.A.T. preparation, and reschedule family affairs.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has recorded sound in excess of permissible levels, and issued a notice of violation this week to the concert producers for the Replacements’ too-loud finale on Friday, which closed a show in which the opening bands had repeatedly been warned to turn it down.

The Open left after its 1977 tournament. Concerts in the 1980s prompted an outcry over noise, litter and traffic. In the 1990s, daylong festivals sponsored by liquor companies brought raucous crowds and charges of racism by a promoter who said neighbors had “a problem with black people coming into the neighborhood.” The music events ended after a flurry of noise code citations from the city.

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