Neighbors Try To Shut Down Banquet Hall Music Tent
(CBS) -- The tent was set up this spring outside a Des Plaines banquet hall.
But when the party moved outside, neighbors say, so did the noise.
With gurgling sprays of water, and a landscape bursting with color, the 6,000-square-foot event tent may look like the perfect place to host a party.
But by night people who live nearby say the tent amounts to a very noisy neighbor.
"I could sit in in my family room, which is downstairs, doors and windows closed, television on, and I can still hear it," resident Dorothy Sarno says.
She and a group of other residents live a few blocks from Fountain Blue Banquet and Conference Center just off Manheim Road.
Neighbors say about two years ago, the owner erected the tent behind his building.
The structure contains the crowds of partiers, they say -- but not the sound.
"It could be the chanting, the singing, the yelling. All those things disturb the peace. And all we want is peace and quiet and also protect our property values," Bill Dillon says.
Fountain Blue's owner says he "has" taken steps to reduce noise, installing a wall of foam panels, pointing speakers inward and shortening the time of events by ending them at midnight instead of 2 a.m.
But neighbors tell the Des Plaines City Council the noise still spills out.
They've asked the council to turn down a permit authorizing the tent to stand another 18 months.
"I want a solution that will address the concerns of the neighbors, the noise, and also I would like Tom Diamond of the Fountain Blue to succeed," Ald. Jim Brookman says.
