I have a story on apartment noise:
When my family lived in Queens, NY, we had a downstairs and elderly neighbor who banged on her ceiling all the time. Something as simple as walking across the floor was met with "bang bang bang".
I went downstairs and knocked on her door and politely asked her to stop banging on her ceiling, which is my floor. We can't float across the room!
She had the same attitude as LoveBoats. She suggested that we take the children to the park all day long, just like the threadstarter, so I gave up since there is no sense in arguing with someone who is going to dig in her heels and be unreasonable no matter what you do. The banging stopped for a couple weeks and then it started up again.
After a few weeks, I got tired of this nonsense, so I went downstairs and knocked on her door, and when she opened, I ripped her a new hole, yelling at her one notch below verbal assault. Her next-door neighbor opened her door and berated me for "harrassing" an elderly person, so I ripped the next-door neighbor a new hole, telling her that this woman was banging on her ceiling because we walked across the floor, and that this was was actually harrassing us, not the other way around. The next-door neighbor went back inside and we never heard from her again.
This stopped the downstairs neighbor's poor behavior for a couple of weeks and then it started again.
After a few weeks, I got tired of this, and knowing that speaking to her didn't do any good, I got out my hammer and placed it in a convenient location, waiting for the old lady's next strike.
The next day, I walked across the floor, heard a "bang bang bang" on my floor, so I calmy walked over to the bookshelf to retrieve the hammer, and I SLAMMED the hammer into the floor seven times. SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM! I slammed the hammer into the floor so hard that there were 7 little circles in the same area of the wood floor.
After that, I could hear the woman's conversations on her phone (I assume she was on the phone since I couldn't hear any reply to her loud whining). I had never heard her speak on the phone before, so apparently she was pissed. These apartment were relatively soundproof. I never heard anything except a faint sound coming from upstairs when people walked across the floor.
I never did get a complaint from the landlord. One reason might be that we had bought our apartment while the old lady downstairs was still rent-stabilized. "Put your money where your mouth is" is a saying that selfish people like her and the OP just don't believe in. Our downstairs neighbor was paying half of what we were paying yet she expected us to cater to her unrealistic demands.
Eventually we moved because of her and another neighbor who had made a written whiny unreasonable complaint, and the overall annoyances of living in an overregulated, overtaxed and dirty and smelly city with 5 million other whiny people just like her.
I think that people like the OP who make trouble with people who live nearby and make normal everyday noise because they aren't dead or comatose should be fined for harrassment.
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