The Used Car Lot Next Door

Living beside a used car lot can teach you about noise, boundaries, and the limits of goodwill.

Years ago, I lived in a low-rise apartment in Toronto’s Little Portugal, right next to a small lot that sold used cars. Most of their customers were newcomers buying their first vehicle, and the salesmen hustled hard. But as neighbors, they could be… challenging.

They’d rigged the office phone to a loudspeaker outside so they wouldn’t miss calls while working the lot. Too often, they forgot to switch it off at night. We’d hear the ringing phones and fragments of messages people left long after midnight.

Friends, relatives, and former customers who were passing in front of the business would sometimes slow down (disrupting the traffic flow) and honk as they drove by. And sometimes salesmen, friends, and customers would attempt to burn rubber on the small lot in noisy and smoky displays of bravado. It was a mixed-use neighborhood, after all, but the line between liveliness and disruption blurred fast.

Occasionally, someone would steal a car. One night, under the overpowering security lighting on the lot, my neighbors and I watched a man jack up a vehicle and remove the entire transmission. I’m sure the owners had insurance, but each theft still meant paperwork, deductibles, and hassle.

The police would occasionally make the rounds, knocking on doors to ask if we’d seen anything. There was always a polite chorus of “no,” and plenty of feigned surprise.

The truth is, we saw plenty. If the car lot owner and crew had been better neighbors, if they’d kept the noise down, turned off the loudspeaker, shown a little consideration, we might have looked out for them.

But they didn’t, and we didn’t. The boundary between tolerance and indifference had long since been crossed.

I eventually moved away. In time, both the apartment building and the car lot fell to the developer’s wrecking ball, and with them, the noise.