Over the past few years, I’ve frequently received emails from Second Ave. residents complaining of the blasting. From early in the morning to late at night, whistles, blasts and vibrations would rock the neighborhood as MTA contractors went about the slow and torturous process of constructing a subway line. As you can see from the above video, posted by Ben at The Launch Box in March, it’s a loud experience.
Recently, the complaints have seemingly come to a head as the work has continued into the night. According to a brief item in The Post, blasts were going off well the agreed-upon 7 p.m. cut-off time. Residents claim that in recent months, contractors set off 19 blasts after 9 p.m.
Now, the MTA says it will respect the 7 p.m. cutoff time. While original plans called for blasting until midnight, Michael Horodniceanu, the president of MTA Capital Construction, has said the authority will revise blasting guidelines. “People don’t want to have a romantic dinner with the sound of pavement being obliterated in the background,” he said to The Times. “After 7 p.m., we do not blast.”
The MTA has had a tense and often contentious relationship with business and residents along Second Ave., and it’s clearly tough to build a new subway line through a densely-inhabited area. With five more years left on the project, the two sides will have to continue to work together, and limiting the blasting is a long overdue move.
17 comments
9pm is late at night?
Back to Kansas, NIMBY!
this native manhattanite would enjoy quiet after 9, thank you, and i don’t live on 2nd.
Not that I think blasting should stop at 9pm, but it’s late if you have an infant.
As long as same said residents don’t complain if and when the project’s schedule slips and/or it takes longer to complete the underground task. Trade-offs are a fact of life, something all too often not acknowledged.
Midnight is a little late for blasts and the accompanying air horn signals and rumbling but don’t tell me it’s interrupting any ‘romantic dinners’ any more than taxi horns and sirens; they should be able to work on schedule with a 12-15hr blasting window
It’s a litlte hard to believe some of the complaints around this project. Thought NYers had tougher skin than what you see in the news and at meetings
NYCers are will NEVER skip a chance to complain
Eh, it’s the usual NIMBYism. A pretty noisy minority does most of the complaining in any set of circumstances. They could be the screamers screaming about toll hikes on Staten Island or the anti-bike zealots suing to keep the streets from being safe. According to their theology, nobody should ever be bothered (except the people already being bothered, of course).
Our public input process encourages obstruction, plain and simple. A mass of screamers usually gets to mess things up for everybody else, and worthy projects get watered down to be barely any good at all. For whatever reason, politicians are too myopic to see that the wider public might reward them for some courage.
Ok, So what about the schedule now ? And the costs ?
New date of completion…2025.
They should’ve cut-and-covered the damn thing. It would have been a mess, but at least it would’ve been done already.
utility relocation.
Fire in the Hole (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GSx8zA9tUs
Fire in the Hole (2)
Really, I’m not surprised that they’re complaining so much. There’s a book named “Subwayland”, which is a compilation of numerous New York Times stories, and in it there is an article about the construction of the first subway in New York. If anything is obvious, it was that (in the article’s words) “our urban ancestors suffered greatly for the sake of the transportation we enjoy.” The article showed that there were plenty of complaints about subway construction that could have halted it completely (and at times did). For example, as the crew was blasting around the area of the Waldorf-Astoria at one point,
and the guests of the hotel decided that they weren’t going to take it anymore, and complained angrily to the manager. The manager in turn complained angrily to the Board of Health, who then shut down construction for a period of time. There are other stories like this that show that what those of 2nd Avenue are experiencing has happened before.
To summarize:
Do the people of Second Avenue have legitimate complaints? Yes.
Is it par for the course of subway construction? Also, yes.
So the people of the Upper East Side are complaining that the MTA is actually trying to finish on-time a project that will benefit only them and nobody else in the city. First world problems.
The cynic in me wonders if this is a chance to take advantage of a reduced need for blasting in the project to score a few public relations points with the neighbors and the agency as a whole.
“Look, we’re being sensitive to resident’s concerns and won’t blast so late*”
*because we just don’t have that much left to blast anyway…
The TUNNELS are almost finished,but
they do have the station caverns left to blast.
I agree: it must be that they don’t need to blast so much anymore.
If you have not tried to sleep through 2nd avenue construction work, you would not understand. This is not the same as jackhammers or regular construction work, this is shake your bed silly and keep you up all night type of work.
Please note the contradiction in work hours listed in the article. Construction work is supposed to end at 7 pm. Yet the schedule calls for working until midnight? In other cities, the construction company would need to pay large penalties and receive approval in order to work past the cutoff.