Anyone who lives in a city like New York knows all too well that the most precious commodity is silence. Like any longtime New Yorker, I have spots where I go to escape the cacophony outside: The New York Earth Room at Dia in Soho featuring Walter de Maria’s interior sculpture of 250 cubic yards of dirt; the vine-cloaked pergola overlooking the Hudson River at Wave Hill; the morning hours in the far corner of Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery ; the top-floor reading room at Jefferson Market Library; and St. Paul’s, an austere Catholic church on the corner of Congress and Court Streets not far from my home.

After all, even a conversation on the platform of the 6 train at Union Square station can be a challenge. The high-pitched screeching of incoming trains regularly sends decibel levels

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