The MTA is going beyond the call (literally as phone calls and angry messages are filling up their inboxes) of duty to ensure that residents on the Upper East Side are getting a good night’s sleep.
After repeated complaints that residents are being kept awake at night by construction at the future 72nd Street subway station, the MTA will begin offering nighttime visits to apartments around the area. Engineers from the agency will start their visits starting around 10 p.m. in order to hear the noise and feel the pain that residents are going through while construction continues on the Second Avenue subway line.
“[The agency] is still working on addressing the ongoing noise issues after 10 p.m.,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said in a statement. “Engineers offered to visit a sample of apartments to assess the noise in order to evaluate the residents’ experience with respect to a potential mitigation strategy.”
After a meeting on Thursday night, the MTA also said that it would try to drill earlier in the day in order to lower the noise level so residents can sleep better. Along with the nighttime visits, the MTA is also considering installing monitors in some of the apartments around the area, in an effort to track the noise level of construction throughout the night.
The MTA’s decision was prompted in part by a letter earlier in the month from State Senator Liz Krueger and others asking for relief from the latest drilling.
“Residents are doing all they can to adapt to living with the disturbance of this project and there is a limit to how much we can ask our constituents to endure,” the letter said. “There comes a point when individual residents are unable to mitigate the effects of this type of work and must be granted some reprieve.”
Residents in the area have also complained about the dust and smells that have come from the construction site.
The new subway line, which will be dubbed the T Line, will stretch down the East Side of Manhattan from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in the Financial District.
The project is still in phase one of development, which began in April 2007, and is expected to be completed by December 2016. However, night drilling around the station is supposed to be completed by June.
Until then, Upper East Side residents can look forward to the nightly company of MTA workers.
