via Getty

Rihanna brought down the house at her concert at the Barclays Center on Sunday night, taking the entire neighborhood with her, according to Prospect Heights residents.

But the loud, booming bass rumblings that disrupted the neighborhood on Sunday night were nothing new for people who live in the direct vicinity of the Barclays Center. These complaints come less than a week after Barclays Center developer Forest City Ratner Companies was ordered to pay the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) a $3,200 fine for violations after a Swedish House Mafia concert in early March.

The Barclays Center has faced many noise complaints and several potential fines since it opened in September. Residents have complained of noise pollution after major concerts including Jay-Z in September, the Sensation dance concert events in October and the Swedish House Mafia concert. Until last week, the complaints were dismissed on technicalities.

According to city records, inspectors recorded a reading of 55 decibels (dB) for low noise frequency inside a nearby apartment the during the Swedish House Mafia show on Saturday, March 2. The 55 dB rate is about twice as loud as the 45 dB limit, as stipulated by the New York City Noise Code, section 24-231:

“No person shall make or cause or permit to be made any music origination form or in connection with the operation of any commercial establishment or enterprise when the level of sound attributable to such music, as measured inside any receiving property dwelling unit: … is in excess of 45 dB in any one-third octave band having a center frequency between 63 hertz and 500 hertz.”

According to the NYC DEP, noise complaints are the number one quality of life issue for New Yorkers. The agency updated the Noise Code in 2007 to “…balance the important reputation of New York as a vibrant, world-class city that never sleeps, with the needs of those who live in, work in, and visit the city.”

The Barclays Center has not yet returned The Observer’s request for comment.

The Atlantic Yards Watch, a community-based blog that reports on the neighborhood impacts of the Barclays Center and construction from the Atlantic Yards project, cited several texts and phone calls made to 311 on Sunday night reporting excessive noise during Rihanna’s concert. Prospect Heights residents were outraged that the noise pollution continues, despite the fines. The Atlantic Yards Watch provided the following transcripts from the calls:

“Rihanna is as loud as SHM or Sensations!!”

“Are you f****** kidding me, why can’t the police do something?”

“YIKES!! Why are they starting so late?”

“It woke us up!”

“Guess they haven’t done anything to minimize the noise!”

“[Past] midnight and they’re still going, when will it end?”

“Why are these noisy types of concerts allowed on Sunday nights?

Peter Krashes, who runs the Atlantic Yards Watch Blog and serves as a member of the Dean Street Block Association and secretary of the Prospect Heights Heights Neighborhood Development Council, said noise complaints have come from east, west and north of the Barclays Center, as far as a block away from the arena.

“The solution is probably structural,” Mr. Krashes told The Observer, citing the original plans for the arena, which were not anticipated to produce noise problems. The original design by architect Frank Gehry was replaced in 2009 by the design from Ellerbe Becket and SHoP Architects.

“For the short term [The Barclays Center] can put stipulations on the contracts of performers to limit noise levels, which it clearly hasn’t done,” Mr. Krashes added.

Mr. Krashes further noted that the DEP will continue to measure the noise level from the Barclays Center, and that the arena is conducting its own inspections.

“We’d like to know to what end they’re working,” Mr. Krashes said of the Barclays Center inspections. “If this was a bar or a restaurant, they could be shut down because it’s illegal.”

The Atlantic Yards Report noted last week that the fine may not be enough to solve the problem.

“For a neighborhood bar, a $3,200 fine for a noise violation can cause pocketbook pain. For an arena earning millions from concert tickets and concessions, it may be the cost of doing business, especially if they can fend off some fines with procedural arguments,” blogger Norman Oder wrote.

Rihanna will perform her second Barclays Center show tonight, around the same time the Atlantic Yards Quality of Life Committee will convene at a local YMCA to discusses quality of life issues with representatives from Forest City Ratner, the Barclays Center and Empire State Development, which is overseeing the Atlantic Yards project.

Several residential buildings will be constructed next to the Barclays Center as part of the Atlantic Yards project in the coming years.

“I think a lot of people are assuming they’re going to solve this problem by the time they build the residential buildings adjacent to the arena,” Mr. Krashes said. “But are we to wait two years for them to fix this?"

The Columbus Avenue bioswale.

The sidewalks of Manhattan are famous for surprises—outré fashions, bizarre dog breeds and outlandish happenings (where else would an underwear-clad cowboy have a hard time turning heads?)—but it's not often that the sidewalks themselves cause double-takes.

Recently, though, an unusual sidewalk/curb/tree pit combo by the corner of Columbus Avenue and 76th Street has been catching the eyes of local passerby. At first glance, the elongated tree pit doesn't appear all that different than its Upper West Side peers: a delicate sapling protected from the large population of neighborhood dogs by a shin-high iron railing. But on closer examination, the odd characteristics pop out: rather than a standard curb, a border of rocks rings the pit, broken up by two big notches cut out of the curb. Manhattan's first bioswale, according to the Columbus Avenue BID which installed it.

A bioswale, or bioretention swale, is basically a tiny, curbside garden designed to act like a big sponge, sopping up rainwater and street runoff that floods the city's sewer systems during storms and compromises the health of local waterways. The low notched curb is designed to catch water, which is is filtered through layers of stones to purify it and protect the hardy plants that it hydrates.

A close-up view of the bioswale.

While a number of bioswales have been installed in Brooklyn (in March the Department of Environmental Protection installed 29 in East New York to reduce pollution in Jamaica Bay), and hundreds more will be installed in the future as part of a $10 billion DEP green infrastructure overhaul of the wastewater system, the Columbus Avenue bioswale is one of the few to be built by an outside non-profit group and the first to be built in Manhattan.

The bioswale installation came about as part of a broader effort to transform the block between 77th Street and 76th—dominated by a vista of concrete, blacktop and the chain link fence of a nearby schoolyard—into something a little more lush. Coming at the end of a corridor that takes hordes of tourists from Central Park and the thick greenery surrounding the Museum of Natural History to the shops and restaurants of the Upper West Side, the stark streetscape has long been a jarring, and incongruous sight.

The new makeover aims to change the block into a shade-filled oasis where tourists and locals will linger, with nine new trees and elongated 10-foot tree beds, ergonomic benches, in-ground solar lighting and a solar-operated compacting trash can. Overall, the project cost about $100,000 and spanned 10 years of fundraising and planning, according to Barbara Adler, executive director of the Columbus Avenue BID.

Solar lights are also part of the streetscape.

"I sometimes though it would never come to fruition," Ms. Adler told The Observer as she pointed out the improvements on a recent afternoon. "Some were calling it Barbara's folly."

While the Columbus Avenue bioswale's performance during stormy weather has yet to be assessed, the DEP said that their bioswales (they warned that the building specifications, and therefore performance, of other bioswales may vary) soak up 2,244 gallons during storms.

The bioswales built by the DEP are aimed at reducing the untreated sewage overflow into specific waterways like the Gowanus and Jamaica Bay—an unfortunate side effect of New York City's combined sewer system, which mixes sewage and rainwater together. After years of investing in "grey" infrastructure, like building huge holding tanks to keep storm overflows until they could be treated safely discharged, the DEP has increasingly focused on greener, more cost-efficient solutions like bioswales, which help to minimize the pressure on the system and ultimately, the pollution of local waterways.

New York's aging system funnels, on average, $1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day through 7,500 miles of sewers to water treatment plants, a system that has the capacity to handle twice that capacity in dry weather, according to a DEP spokesperson, but one that is easily overwhelmed during storms. When more than an inch or rain falls an hour, the excess rainwater gets discharged, untreated, into local waterways.

While the amount of rainwater that the Columbus Avenue bioswale soaks up might seem like a drop in the bucket, it will mean a slightly less strained sewer system. And maybe more importantly, a glimpse of how the city infrastructure might be changed for the better in the future—a  lesson in sustainability for the local children, who were, on the afternoon that The Observer checked out the revamped block, busy sketching Columbus Avenue from the other side of the school's chain link fence.

Happy V-Day sweetheart!

If your special sweety is a hipster residing in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, this holiday is especially hard. What can you get them, a pre-order of the Girls: Season 1 box set? Luckily, the Department of Environmental Protection has your back. Raw sewage, anyone?

According to the AP's Big Story Tumblr:

The Department of Environmental Protection is again offering Valentine's Day tours of the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section.

The DEP says it's offering three tours this year due to "overwhelming demand."

The 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. tours were quickly filled. So another was added at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Highlights include the plant's giant egg-shaped digesters, which break down noxious waste into harmless sludge and gas.

This idea is especially good for any young lady who claims to hate Valentine's Day, uses phrases like "the Hallmark-industrial complex," and has still made you confirm four times that you're going to be around to "hang" on Thursday. This should teach her about managing expectations.

While the only serious flooding we saw last night was on 2nd Street, this morning saw waters creeping up almost every block next to the canal near Carroll Gardens. Flooding in the canal is troubling as its a superfund site that is home to extensive industrial activity and has a long, well-deserved reputation as a hotbed of toxic sludge and pollutants. The Environmental Protection Agency describes the canal as "one of the nation's most extensively contaminated water bodies."

We reached out to several elected officials to get their take on the environmental and flooding risks on the Gowanus during the peak storm surge this evening. The only response we got was from the Mayor's Press Office, which directed us to Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Corey Chambliss.

"Let me look into this and get back to you," Mr. Chambliss said.

We'll update as soon as we have further information. For now, click the slideshow to see pictures of the floodwaters along the banks of the canal.

Update (6:39 p.m.): Mayor Bloomberg and one of his deputies discussed the situation with the Gowanus Canal in a press conference this evening.

Update (6:49 p.m.): Mr. Chambliss provided the following statement about flooding on the Gowanus Canal.

"This was just addressed in the Mayor’s remarks, but in addition: We encourage residents to observe existing advisories regarding the Gowanus Canal, and will work with the EPA to determine any potential impacts that result from flooding. Residents should wash their hands and practice proper hygiene if they come into contact with the canal’s water or sediments," Mr. Chambliss said.

Update (10:48 p.m.): Here are some pictures of the canal flooding during the peak of the storm this evening.

It happened Thursday , before the park got busy, and the news first appeared on the front page of The Times this morning. That the city would allow the USDA to creep into the park and cull the birds with nary a protest and certainly no public discussion is a questionable PR strategy. Along with free summer concerts and the Long Meadow, the geese were one of the delights of visiting Prospect Park—for kids, bird-lovers, and anthropomorphizers alike (I include myself in the latter).

Anyone who doubts the geese's popularity need only note the virality of the recent Times story about "Sticky," the goose whose neck was pierced by an arrow, or the recent stories in the Brooklyn Paper about animals turning up dead near the Prospect Park Lake.

And it didn't have to be this way.

In early June, Dave Avrin, the director of Gateway National Park in Queens, earned himself an angry editorial in the Daily News when he, unlike the city, resisted the federal government's efforts to cull the geese who live in his park.

"Our mission is to protect and preserve wildlife—that's a law—and it isn't a given that the removal of the geese is necessary to protect the flying public," Mr. Avrin told the AP. This, even though the park is much closer to JFK Airport than Prospect Park.

The geese culling frenzy stems, of course, from the January 15 crash landing of a U.S. Airways flight in the Hudson River after geese were sucked into the plane's engines. Remember? This was the Miracle on the Hudson, in which no one died. According to the same AP article, which cited FAA stats, between 1990 and 2008, there were just 11 civilian deaths resulting from about 1,200 bird-plane collisions in the U.S., but the guilty birds were "not necessarily geese."

Forgive us for saying so, but this strikes us as overkill.

drubinstein@observer.com

Amid the current, near-narcoleptic state of the market, lease renewals are one of the few signs that the the commercial sector has not rolled over and died.

It’s not as sexy as, say, Harry Macklowe finally selling the GM Building, but hey, it’s something.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has renewed its 20,088-square-foot lease on the eighth floor of the 39-story tower at 1250 Broadway and West 32nd Street. SL Green’s Elaine Anazagasty negotiated on behalf of the landlord.

Meanwhile, the Omnicom Group, a marketing firm, has renewed its 55,078-square-foot lease at 220 East 42nd Street, the building made famous as “The News Building” in the 1950s Superman TV show. Lee Feld of Feld Real Estate exclusively represented Omnicom in the transaction.