🔊 The Longfellow ...Hum?

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Every other room in Chris Miller’s modest Longfellow bungalow sounds normal: Mostly quiet, occasionally punctuated by an airplane or 36th Avenue traffic. (Or, every once in a while, a Longfellow Boom.)

But in his upstairs bedroom — where quiet matters most — a deep, choppy vibration is almost constant. 

Chris and his wife began to notice the noise last winter. And unlike the neighborhood’s titular Boom, which is occasional and thundering, the noise in their room is constant and almost subaural, like a distant helicopter you feel more than hear. Earplugs don’t muffle it and white noise doesn’t cover it up. It's not there all the time, but it's there most of it. And it’s in those rare quiet moments that he finds himself thinking about the noise more, because of how peaceful the room seems in its absence. 

"It isn't like living next to an airport, or a busy street," he says. "It's so subtle, but it just worms its way in, and makes you lose your freaking mind."

Chris began asking around last year. Most of his immediate neighbors didn’t know what he was talking about. But over time, he began to find others who were also plagued by the noise, some of whom had been on their own parallel journeys to figure it out. A commenter on a Facebook thread said it "sounds like rolling thunder but goes on forever." An attendee at a recent neighborhood meeting said their neighbor moved away because they couldn’t take the noise.

He’s now met enough people bothered by the noise to rule out it being an individual hallucination — a common initial fear among the impacted parties. And they're aligned on a few theories: That the sound seems to come from the ADM "Atkinson" grain mill at 38th and Hiawatha. Most likely from the industrial fans on top of the building. And, though the mill is old, the noise is a new phenomenon.

But beyond that, it remains mysterious. The group of people who hear it don’t live in a tight geographic cluster. Chris himself is more than 10 blocks away from the mill and says most of his neighbors have still never noticed it. One resident, who’s been in her home for more than 50 years, says she picks up on it but her husband and daughter don’t. Someone who lives directly behind the mill says they've never heard it. Some say it’s worse in the winter, without leaves on the trees; others in the summer, without snow to dampen the sound. Some notice it more during the day, others at night. 

Last year a group of neighbors made a plea to Councilmember Aurin Chowdhury, who, along with city staff, has made a series of mostly-unsuccessful attempts to discuss the issue with the building's owner, Illinois-based milling giant ADM. The company has simply said that nothing has changed about its operation in the past few years. (The hulking mill has operated continuously for 111 years and today is the last industrial mill still operating in Minneapolis.) Permit records indicate the facility completed a "reconfiguration of dust collection system" around the time Chris began noticing the noise.

The city took a different tack this winter, initiating a sound study used to help determine if a business is violating noise pollution rules. That involved setting up a 360-degree microphone at three locations of varying proximity for close to a week. At a recent community meeting to discuss the results, inspector Elan Quezada Hoffman said he’s been fielding questions about the noise since 2020, which have included at least 28 complaints to 311. But, alas, he said the study didn’t document any noise levels worthy of infraction. 

Chris, whose house was the site of one of the microphones, applauded the effort but says he isn’t surprised it didn’t find a violation. For logistical reasons the microphone was set up in his sideyard, which is plenty quiet; the sound seems to be limited to a tight beam aimed straight at his bedroom window. Another test site host, who lives on the other side of Hiawatha, said most of his backyard is shielded from the noise. Another study participant pointed out that the noise isn’t so much loud as it is vibrational, which the equipment might not measure. 

For now the issue remains at an irritating, rumbling stalemate. Councilmember Chowdhury says the city Operations Officer Margaret Anderson Kelliher has been in contact with ADM’s lobbyist. City officials encouraged people bothered by the noise to file a 311 complaint to help them better understand the pattern.