MICHAEL Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, is fighting noise in what may be one of America's noisiest cities. Bloomberg has been dispatching city cops equipped with measurement devices to arrest, tow away or give citations to - or all of those - the people and things that make noise at illegal levels.

The campaign started a couple of months ago and is in full sway, appropriately named Operation Silent Night. With all the problems New York has, it's astonishing - perhaps admirable - that Bloomberg has the time to take on noise and cigarette smokers.

Baltimore - a much quieter city than New York - has a noise ordinance, too. I know this because I was The Sun's City Hall reporter when the bill passed the City Council June 5, 1972, and reported that the law was "regarded by many as one of the most progressive pieces of legislation passed by the City Council in recent years."

Looking back, I'd be hard-pressed to say who the many were, but by the standards of the Baltimore City Council then and now, it might not have been an exaggeration to say the noise ordinance was the most progressive legislation ever enacted.

The sponsor of the bill was something of a phenomenon himself. This was Councilman Robert J. Fitzpatrick, whose light shined in Baltimore for a few years before he left town without completing his only term as a member of the council.

The extraordinary thing was that Fitzpatrick was not from Baltimore. He wasn't even born in the United States. He was born in Canada. He got his citizenship in 1963, was among the howling anti-war throng at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and came to Baltimore as a young dean of students at the Johns Hopkins University.

In 1971, a year that broke many gears in the city's political machinery, this virtual stranger was elected to the City Council.

That was the year Barbara A. Mikulski (now U.S. senator from Maryland) stunned the b'hoys of East Baltimore and was elected to the council. It also was the year that William Donald Schaefer stunned himself by getting elected mayor for the first time.

Mikulski's political passion was to make certain a huge highway was not built through her precious Fells Point and Highlandtown. Fitzpatrick's passion was noise.

Fitzpatrick, who now lives in Chicago, where he runs the city's prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art, recalled last week that "I used up all of my political chits to get that bill passed. I remember people thinking I was out of my mind."

(Politically chitless, Fitzpatrick left Baltimore in 1975, a few months before the end of his term, to take over the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Before landing in Chicago four years ago, he directed the cultural component of the Olympics in Los Angeles and headed the extravagant but then economically troubled Euro Disney project in France.)

Baltimore clearly was not big enough for Fitzpatrick, perhaps not even noisy enough, considering the places he has been since leaving here. But the Great Noise Ordinance of 1972 lives on.

And if Mayor Martin O'Malley (speaking of people for whom Baltimore might not be big enough) ever decides the level of noise in the city is endangering the quality of life, he could do just what Mayor Bloomberg is doing in New York.

This is unlikely to happen because the city has more dangerous crimes to worry about - much more dangerous.

But O'Malley is said to be a man of spontaneous eruption. If a car with an out-of-control sound system were to sidle up next to the mayoral limousine and get on his nerves, or if some enraged driver were to go on honking his horn for no good reason at the mayor's car, O'Malley might just get mad enough to do something about it.

The law would be on his side.

He could take down the license number of the car and call Ronald Cuffie, the 56-year-old veteran city employee who is the assistant commissioner for environmental health.

Cuffie has 30 licensed environmental sanitarians on his staff, though he acknowledges, "Noise is one of the minor things they would engage in."

The department also has devices to measure noise levels and is about to order some new ones.

So an enraged O'Malley might send one of these licensed environmental sanitarians, carrying a noise measuring device, to pursue the boom-car or the horn honker.

Most citizens of Baltimore will be relieved to know the city does not spend an inordinate amount of time enforcing the 30-year-old ordinance. But the city is equipped to do so if need be.

If you think somebody's making too much noise, you could call the city Health Department, or you could call the police.

My own calls to the city's police districts one night last week revealed that the cops know little about the ordinance, but they know what to do about noise.

"We tell them they're going to abate the situation or else," explained one cop who did not give her name.

Cuffie is a native of the city. He says that he grew up in a house on Harford Road where the bus passed within 10 feet of his bedroom window. "If I didn't have that noise, I couldn't sleep."

His own view is that if people don't want noise they should probably not live downtown.

"If you're a person who likes quiet, you don't move into the inner city," he says. "You go to Cecil County."