Pounding Away

Is Second Avenue the noisiest street on the Upper East Side? By [Allen Houston] Blaring horns, jackhammers, speeding buses, raucous bars and construction cranes. New York is a city big in everything, including the amount of noise it makes. On the Upper East Side, no area is louder than the Second Avenue Subway construction zone, where tunnel blasting meets bulldozers meets the new Select Bus Service and narrow sidewalks. Our Town recently walked the streets of the far Upper East Side from 86th to 96th Street to find out exactly how the main hub of Second Avenue Subway construction compared to surrounding avenues in terms of noise pollution. Using a Pyle Pro sound level reader, measurements were taken between 86th and 96th streets and Lexington to 1st Avenue. By far the loudest readings were taken at 96th Street and 2nd Avenue, where cranes lifted detritus from a pit and jackhammers pile-drove the pavement. "There"s too much noise and it affects my business. Who wants to shop in a store where it"s so loud that they can"t think? asked an employee at Optimo Deli, on 96th Street and Second Avenue. The reading there was many times higher than in the surrounding streets. The decibel (dB) is the universal unit of sound measurement, used to note how loud everything is, from your stereo to an idling bus. Decibels are logarithmic, which means that a noise registering at 30 decibels is 10 times louder than a noise registering at 20 decibels. Further down, at 92nd Street and Second Avenue at Delizia Pizzeria, the sound was a relatively peaceful 78.1 decibels. Joe Pecora, owner of Delizia and head of the Second Avenue Business Association, said he"s grown used to the clanging and banging outside of his store. "I"m focused on trying to make it through the next four years, Pecora said. "The lines of communication are open with the MTA, and if there"s a problem, I talk with them about it. His opinion mirrored those of several dog walkers, who said that the construction noise has become the background of their life. The goal of the New York City Noise Code is to reduce â??the making, creation or maintenance of excessive and unreasonable and prohibited noises within the city [that] affects and is a menace to public health, comfort, convenience, safety, welfare and prosperity of the people of the city. One person who thinks that trust has been breached and wants to calm some of the construction clatter is Arlene Bronzaft, a psychologist and noise expert who has served under the past four mayors as chair of the noise committee in the city"s Council on the Environment. Bronzaft got started in the field after she conducted a study on the effects of train noise on children in school in 1974. A group of students endured the constant clatter of an elevated subway rumbling past and were found to be behind their peers in reading by a grade level. Bronzaft went to the Board of Education and the Transit Authority to implore them to install soundproofing and lubricate the tracks to quiet the trains. Both measures were implemented, and the classrooms near the tracks were markedly quieter. A year later, Bronzaft tested the same students and found them up to speed with their classmates. The Upper East Sider blames poor planning on the decibel stretching level of Second Avenue's as well as the addition of the Select Avenue Bus line rumbling along the narrow roads. "I"m very angry because I don"t think they implemented the precautions that they should have when they started, Bonzaft said. All construction projects are required to have a noise mitigation plan. The New York Noise Code recommends using quieter tools and equipment, though it"s only a recommendation, not a requirement. Bonzaft said they should require noise-reducing mufflers on jackhammers or portable street barriers to reduce the sound that reaches nearby areas. The question that you have to ask is, does it have to be so loud? Are there things that they could have done differently? she said. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who has been instrumental in pushing the Second Avenue Subway project to fruition, said she hasn"t received noise complaints for the subway project. However, I have been advised that recent blasting for the excavation of the 72nd Street cavern occurred near the debris-removal shaft, and that may be why those blasts were more audible. I understand that as blasting moves elsewhere in the cavern, the sound levels should decrease. In any event, the MTA should be using the best available noise abatement technology, and I will ask them to confirm that they are doing so, she said in a statement. Bonzaft"s biggest worry is how loud the ventilation building that is being built on 69th Street to circulate air into the subway and allow for evacuation is going to be. "I"m already hearing how nervous the community is getting about this. The thing to do is to make sure that, going forward, everything is as quiet as possible. Once you have a noisy neighbor, try and quiet them down and see how well that works.