Let Langer paint the picture for you:

"You come home, you've had a nice night, had a hard week," he says. "You watch a little Saturday Night Live. Start slumbering. The window is open, you feel a nice, balmy breeze ..."

He pauses, as if to signify sleep.

"And then you hear these sounds, like, Huuuuugh! Hoowaauunngh!"

: evan lopez

It is a mysterious sound. Messina describes it as "loud" and "guttural," though "not aggressive." It tends to begin at 2 a.m., just after the bars close, and continues until all ungodly hours. It's wordless, but communicative, jubilant, but strained.

"I think it's the sound of overindulgence and beer drinking," Messina says. But not just any beer drinking. "It's the sound of a certain demographic. It's not the sound of the Manayunk working-class drunk."

In the early and mid-'90s, Manayunk, a neighborhood of old row homes packed densely upon steep hills, was a classic example of Philly's perpetual old vs. young, blue- vs. white-collar development fight. Dozens of newspaper articles with headlines like "Chic Shock" documented parking problems and squabbles about new restaurants and liquor licenses.

Over the next few years, the fight faded. The old guard moved out, Main Street became fashionable, and residences more than doubled in value (some new condos will be selling for up to $700,000).

But Manayunk developed differently than many other post-working-class Philly neighborhoods. Instead of the typical gentrification crowd ... hipsters and young professionals buying their first homes ... it attracted college and post-college twentysomethings who rented row homes and partied hard.

Recently, neighborhood activists say, things have been changing. More people are buying homes, and a more mature culture is emerging. But for a number of older residents, the situation has grown intolerable. They are grownups, they say, who live in the middle of a frat house.

Messina was never one of the blue-collar old-timers. Now 50, she moved into her home two blocks up from Main Street 20 years ago, shortly before gentrification picked up steam. She recalls friends looking at her place and saying, "Oh, what a great investment!"

"I said, 'What are you talking about, investment? It's my home!'"

Thus motivated, Messina, an energetic health researcher, set out to fight Manayunk's development, first as a member of the Manayunk Neighborhood Council, and then with her own group, Residents United for a Greater Manayunk. (She also formed Friends of the Manayunk Canal, in 1996, which opposed building lofts on Venice Island because of flooding dangers; she felt vindicated a couple of weeks ago.) Messina even proposed establishing an "entertainment district," wherein landlords and business owners would pay an extra tax for sanitation and quality-of-life enforcement. But she found herself losing more than she won.

Today, Messina's home is surrounded by rentals. She doesn't really know any of her neighbors, she says, because they move out after a year or two, but during their stays, their contributions to the neighborhood include red cups and beer cans, as well as "Huuuughhh!" As early as 1997, a City Planning Commission survey found that older Manayunk residents gave the neighborhood lower quality-of-life ratings than their younger counterparts, and some of Messina's peers have moved away. Nancy Hickman, 54, moved to Wynnewood in April, because her neighbors "didn't seem to have any regard for the basic rules of living in a neighborhood." To her, Manayunk had become a training facility for twentysomething pre-adults.

When he's woken in the middle of the night, Langer's first impulse is to try to go back to sleep. But then he remembers the advice he's gotten at community meetings: "What you need to do," officials say, "is call the police."

Capt. John Cerrone, the commanding officer of the 5th District, says his unit gets "quality-of-life" calls frequently, and "respond[s] to those."

"The noise has to cease," officers say, "and if we return we're going to make arrests." They also visit the sites of parties the next day, to speak with occupants "when they're in a better frame of mind."

In Langer's experience, though, the police show up "after 20-45 minutes or not at all," and revelers have learned to avoid them by turning off the lights and music when they pull up.

Enforcement of quality-of-life laws can be difficult. It's not always a top priority for police (although the 5th District enjoys relatively little crime), and punishments like arrests often seem disproportionate for infringements like shouting.

"Most of the time we will give the occupants [of a party house] the benefit of the doubt," says Cerrone.

Earlier this year, outgoing Councilman Michael Nutter convened a "liquor task force" to help coordinate a response to nuisance concerns, and the group held its second meeting of this spring, to prepare for the June 11th Manayunk Bike Race. But at 1 a.m. on the 11th, the Councilman found himself at the intersection of Lyceum and Levering streets, watching a crowd of several hundred gather for an event called the "Suicide Run," in which partiers ride anything with wheels ... shopping carts, baby carriages, wheelchairs ... down the famously steep "Manayunk Wall."

John Boyce was staying with his father at his home on the corner that night. The event, he says, was out of control:

"They were chanting 'EAGLES' and taunting the cops."

Messina fantasizes about calling the landlords of party houses in the middle of the night, "until they are awakened from a deep sleep," she writes in an e-mail. "Then, when they answer, I would hang up. Annoying, huh?"

She has contacted several landlords (by day) to complain. At least one was surprised by her concern.

"Everybody knows Manayunk's a party town," he said.

When contacted by City Paper, Anthony Pastore, who owns a house around the corner from Messina, said that while he generally rents to young people, he prefers girls (whom he considers better behaved) as tenants, and doesn't allow partying. But another property owner, who didn't want his name in the paper, said that he's tired of complaints from residents like Messina.

"All they do is bitch and moan about the bars," he says. "You bought that for 60 grand, [you] can sell it for $300,000. Move the fuck out! Get out of the way of the people who are here for a certain purpose."

A 24-year-old named Matt, who lives in a home behind Messina's, shares this view.

"Without the bars and kids, the real estate wouldn't be worth anything," he says with a wave of his hand.

Messina has heard this argument before. Asked why she doesn't move, she gestures toward her porch and backyard, "Look at my house!" she says. Moreover, she feels like she shouldn't have to move. She doesn't think her request for a night's sleep is unreasonable.

Manayunk's leaders say that folks like Messina should hold out hope. Both Jane Glenn, past president of the Manayunk Neighborhood Council, a civic association, and Kay Sykora, the executive director of the Manayunk Development Corporation, say they've noticed a new trend: slightly older young professionals buying, rather than renting, new homes.

Numbers are hard to come by, because Glenn and Sykora both put this trend in the past year, and there hasn't been a census done. But they cite people like Patrick Jones, a professor at the University of the Arts, who bought a home three years ago ... "I don't want to live in a retirement community," he says ... as well as the new Dranoff loft developments on Venice Island (the ones Messina opposed as a flood risk). The lofts will be owner-occupied, and sell for $300,000 to $700,000, far too expensive for college kids.

Sykora thinks these sorts of changes will help with the quality-of-life problems.

"Housing goes into a rental phase," she says, "but when an area really begins to solidify is when it begins to cycle out. ... When people purchase, they're committing to the neighborhood." The partying phase is "not what I would have chosen," but "it's part of the evolution."

Messina doesn't buy it. She thinks Manayunk is stuck where it is ... a party town ...because "the residents weren't considered valuable stakeholders. ... If you have the money or if you have power you are highly influential in shaping policy," and this doesn't happen to your neighborhood.

It is 11:15 p.m. now, and there is shouting in the homes behind Messina's. It will end up being a quiet night, but Messina can't be sure of that as she sorts through some old Manayunk photos, from an exhibit she put together in 1991. One photo in particular catches her eye: an older man, sitting by the train tracks below Main Street, with a forty of Old Milwaukee. He was the neighborhood drunk, she explains, looking wistfully at the picture.

"I miss him," she says. "He was quiet."