Friday, March 25, 2016

QUIETEST PLACE IN THE WORLD

Want peace and quiet?  Hey, yay -- head for Redmond, Washington.

We lived there when my husband, actor John Cullum, was playing Holling the bartender, in the television series, "Northern Exposure."

It was a relatively quiet life, but noisy neighbors were a problem. We were living in a row of identical apartments. Then we moved to the guest house on the Spaulding estate. (E.E. Spaulding was one of the richest men in the state of Washington). It was quiet, isolated, in a corner of a huge grass lawn. The only noise  -- it was a twice-a week -- came from three gardeners, who arrived to care for the huge lawns and garden. The noise from their machines was LOUD and quite awful.

I wish we'd know the guys who ran Bill Gates' Microsoft back then. Here's the quietest place in the world.

This area is part of the inner sanctum, according to a Time Magazine reporter. It's an anechoic chamber (no echo's or reverberations, pronounced 'ane ko ic'), in Microsofts' Redmond, Washington audio lab. It set a record in Guinness World Records, as the quietest place on earth.

Since we live in the heart of Manhattan, on an extremely busy cross street, next time John Cullum works in a West Coast television show, we'll head for Redmond and find a place to live near that anechoic audio lab.

4 comments:

Larry Enright said...

I'll take it!

Carola said...

I need to live in a quiet place. We have some traffic noise, but still it's peaceful where we live.

Stan said...

Sometimes the quietest place in my world is my head...Great article Em, thanks.

Unknown said...

Amazing how one gets used to things. For years I lived on the second floor of a luxury high rise on the corner of 72nd St and First Avenue in NYC. Right beneath my window was a bus stop. Con Edison was constantly Dig[ging] We Must for a Better New York and car horns were forever tooting. I lived there for 15 years and was rarely aware of any of it.

Today I live in a tiny house, on a quiet street in sleepy Capitola, CA.. Granted I have double pane windows (which I did not have on East 72nd Street), but still it is so quiet here that you can't hear a bird chirp with the windows closed.

Please feel free to stay here, the next time JC is shooting a TV show, here in Santa Cruz. xxxx