For more than two decades, Tim Tomlinson has toiled in a city of honking cabs and crying children, screaming sirens and drunken revelers.

This week, in the culmination of nearly a decade of noise complaints against an Upper West Side bar, Mr. Tomlinson celebrated a measure of satisfaction. The Blue Donkey Bar, his downstairs neighbor on Amsterdam Avenue, announced that it would close rather than contest a police designation as a neighborhood nuisance. Mr. Tomlinson, the owners said in a letter pasted to the bar’s front window, deserved the credit — or the blame.

“People think you just have to suffer,” said Mr. Tomlinson, 55, a writing instructor at New York University. “Now, everybody who knows the neighborhood will want to come shake my hand.”

Over the last several years, Mr. Tomlinson said, he would send community leaders a typed document that grew to 40 to 50 pages, single-spaced, outlining his grievances against the bar, whose outdoor patio was just beneath the windows of his second-floor apartment on 84th Street.