Truffles Tribeca resident Joe Caccamo says the noise from the pile driver at the construction site across the street is insufferable.
BY YANNIC RACK
Construction noise is pile-driving them crazy.
Residents of an upscale Tribeca rental building say they’re under assault by the constant cacophony from the building site of another luxury residence across the street.
“It’s like being on the tarmac of an airport. It’s absurd,” said Joe Caccamo, who lives in a penthouse apartment at Truffles Tribeca, a luxury building on Desbrosses St. near the Hudson River.
Caccamo and many of his fellow residents say the racket from the project at 440 Washington St. across the road reaches deafening levels during the day — a particular problem for those who, like Caccamo, work from home.
“At seven in the morning, it’s — ‘BAM!’ I gotta get out of my room because it’s so loud,” he said, adding that the noise has become unbearable in the past month.
Another resident, who moved into Truffles five months ago and wished to stay anonymous, said the noise would have been a dealbreaker for him.
“If I had known [this would happen], I never would have moved here,” he said. “It’s insane. You can’t earplug your way through it. It’s like a full-blown earthquake.”
But a spokeswoman for Related Companies, which is managing construction on the project, denied that anything was out of order.
“All of the work on the site is in compliance with Department of Buildings standards and permits,” she said in an email.
The main nuisance is a giant pile driver, which is currently pounding steel sheets into the ground to retain the soil until the new foundation walls are poured, according to Related.
Although the work site has no recent violations from the Department of Buildings, 20 complaints have been registered with the city’s 311 hotline over the last two weeks — all of them relating to loud construction equipment within a one-block radius of the building site.
On a recent weekday morning, the pile driver pounded for intervals of about 20 seconds repeated several times over a 30-minute period. At street level in front of Truffles Tribeca, a standard sound meter registered the racket at an average of 95 decibels, with a peak level of 105 decibels, which falls within the guidelines for impact pile drivers used by the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency that regulates construction noise in the city.
The Related spokeswoman said the sheeting work will go on through the end of the year.
But not everyone in the neighborhood is so bothered by the noise.
“I haven’t really heard it,” said Mary Claire Inglish, who lives on the fifth floor of Truffles Tribeca. “It’s not great, but it doesn’t bother me,” she said, although she added that she usually isn’t home during weekdays.
Page Dickinson, who works at the FIKA coffee shop around the corner, said the noise was actually good for business.
“If anything, we’re gaining customers, because they gotta wake up early now anyway,” she said. “People come in and say, ‘well I might as well get a coffee ‘cause I’m not sleeping today.’”
