Co-Op Owners in Uproar Over Recent Subway Roars

By ANNIE KARNI, Special to the Sun
November 22, 2006

Inside the elegant co-op at 150 E. 61 St., apartments vibrate when the uptown no. 6 train rolls through on the Lexington Avenue line. A resident of the building, Ashish Shah, says the subway noises sometimes keep his 2-year-old son awake at night in their second-floor apartment.

Residents on the west side of the building, which sits just north of Bloomingdale's, say they have lived with humming, screeching, and vibrating in their homes for close to a year and that until this week, the MTA has been unable to mitigate the noise.

The building's doorman, Bobby Dyal, said this is the first time in his 20-year tenure that residents have complained about subway noises in their apartments.

Fed up with the vibrations, the co-op board took their complaints to the local community board last year for help. At the community board's request, MTA engineers visited the apartment building to test noise levels. Multiple visits by the engineers led to multiple explanations.

First, there was denial.

"The MTA's official position was that there was no noise or vibration," the president of the building's board, Linda Lamel, said. MTA engineers concluded that the noise level from the street was higher than the noise from the subways, according to a spokesman for the agency.

When the community board's transportation committee requested that the MTA reinvestigate the issue last spring, engineers acknowledged the noise problem and attributed it to a faulty track component that needed replacement.

That component was installed late on Monday night. "The replacement should bring the noise-level to a lot lower than it is now," an MTA spokesman, James Anyasi, said. "We're going to closely monitor the location."

"We have been dealing with this problem for months.I just don't understand it. I hope they've really fixed this now, after so long," a resident, Neal Cortell, said.

The managing agent of the building's management corporation, Craig Lamb, said, "Part of the problem is New York. There's always noise. Some people are more sensitive than others," Mr. Lamb said.

"I think every New Yorker accepts noise from the subways as part of the price of living here," the president of the East Midtown Association, Robert Byrnes, said.

Most of the screeching sounds made by subways are caused when trains round sharp curves. In its ongoing efforts to mitigate underground noise, the MTA has installed top of rail friction modifiers and resilient rail fasteners, according to a spokesman. Rails and guardrails are also lubricated almost weekly.