I live on 80th in the UWS and there is similar construction that's been going on behind my building since I moved in last year. Luckily I'm not home during the week, but they still fire up the jackhammers at 8:00 AM sharp on Saturdays. One time I heard a guy screaming "f-you it's f--ing saturday" out his window at them for like 5 minutes straight. The hammering stopped for a brief instant, then immediately resumed, drowning him out.
It's not 24/7, it's 8am to probably 5/6pm. I had a building go up literally next door for 2 years. We lost two windows in rooms that have no other natural light. It was annoying, but we dealt with it.
From a comment on the article:
"The normal way to excavate bedrock is dynamite. This would probably not be feasible on this site. But at this rate, from the photo, they are going to be jackhammering for another three years to reach thirty seven and a half feet. I’ve read that in London the Uber rich do these basement pool - theatre complexes all the time under their town houses, but probably digging out dirt. The neighbors should get their council persons involved to pressure DOB to put a blanket prohibition on what is clearly an untenable method of excavation. A Bedrock Amendment: if the site isn’t big or isolated enough for blasting, bedrock is the limit."[0]
In London, lavish basements have become trendy[1], but they don't have to deal with bedrock so close to the surface. The Guardian article only mentions the noise once.
Fracking has solved the problem. The answer is right-angle drilling, plus the wet diamond-belt saw already used in quarries since 1984.
Drill many holes at the boundary, to the desired depth. Right-angle drill to connect the bottoms of the holes. Pull the saw through the holes to cut the sides of the block-columns. Now grab one block-column, lift it with a crane, and use the saw to make horizontal cuts at appropriate intervals to make rock blocks. Ship the blocks upstate, and use them to construct a mausoleum pyramid on your country estate. ~Or send them to your dwarven workshops to make mugs, tables, doors, and thrones.~
A rich of sufficient moxie would also cut new "local bedrock" countertops out of their own basement-quarry and tell all the other riches they know about how great it is to eat off of what used to be the floor of their very own basement, before they cut it out to make two sub-basements.
Jackhammering makes gravel. Quarrying makes usable blocks.
Maybe I don't understand the "right angle drill" but how do you position this at the bottom of the depth you're excavating, while you're trying to excavate?
Drill vertically to the desired depth. At the bottom of that hole, drill horizontally.
I think the idea is that rather than rotating a power-transfer shaft with a drill bit fixed on the end, you just rotate the drill bit with a "mud motor" and circulate the power-transfer fluid with a pump on the surface. The end of the hole can then proceed in any direction, and the only thing you need to feed down the hole is hydraulic pressure and more length of high-pressure hoses and perhaps data wires to control the bit assembly.
You only need a straight line if you're using the torque on a rigid shaft to transfer power. If you can get the mud-powered drill bit assembly to fit within the bore of the vertical hole, you can drill in any direction you want from the bottom of it. It drills in that direction, and pulls itself into the hole it is boring.
This is only necessary because the stone saw is essentially a cable with high tensile strength coated in tiny bits of diamond. In order to cut, you have to pull the circulating cable through the rock. It's like slicing cheese by putting the cheese on top of a wire and lifting the wire up, rather than by pushing down on it with a knife. Vertical cuts in the rock extend upward from the length of the horizontal drill holes. You are then left with square pillars separated by straight kerf-width grooves.
Now you set anchors in the top of a pillar, and use your crane to apply upward force to counteract the weight of the pillar down to the bottom. Send some decent bearings down to the bottom of the holes, and thread your saw cable down one vertical shaft, around a well-anchored bearing, around three horizontal shafts, around another bearing, and back up an adjacent vertical shaft. Cut through the bottom of the pillar. Stop pulling before you ruin your bearings.
At this point, use the crane to lift the pillar enough to get a lifting jack under it. Now you can work at the surface. Push the pillar up from below with the jack, and cut off the anchor block. Push up more, and cut off height at regular intervals. Some of your blocks will have a quarter of a drill hole on their edges, or anchor bolt holes in them, but most will be as perfect as lasers can make them.
And it just occurred to me that if you have good cable bearings, you can anchor them to the bottom of the vertical holes and cut downward from the surface instead of upward from horizontally-drilled shafts.
~Or send them to your dwarven workshops to make mugs, tables, doors, and thrones.~
They're already rich so no need for further trade goods at this point. Best to continue to dig deeper...
By the way, Dwarffortress is coming to Steam 'soon'.
I live in downtown Jersey City and large construction projects essentially have free reign over the physical and mental peace of the neighbors. My apartment would shake with each jackhammer strike for months as soon as 7am hit. It made WFH nearly impossible. I couldn't even take important phone calls during business hours. The construction is still ongoing. On the bright side, my rent isn't increasing any time soon. The real estate barons can do whatever they want around here.
In addition to that, the same real estate developer built another unsightly building only feet away from 50% of the residents' only view. Resulting in zero privacy, beauty, and sunlight. Not to mention, a 30% decrease in each owner's property valuation.
Living in Downtown Jersey City (2 years ago) was the noisiest and most rage inducing experience of my life. I also made the stupid decision of living close to Marin and Columbus, and experienced sirens at all hours. Those included cops who could seemed to turn on their sirens to go through the red light at that intersection and turn it off as soon as they got through. Sirens + all day construction noise was just torture.
Jersey City cured me of my desire to ever live in NYC. Parts of NYC are quieter, but there's always noise. The suburbs might be boring, but at least I can WFH without going crazy.
I get to hear jake brakes at literally any time of day (nearby paper mill runs 24/7), hourly freight trains (see paper mill) and police sirens slightly less often (in case the paper mill didn't tip you off that I don't live somewhere that's highly gentrified). I'm not gonna feel bad about rich people that have to listen to heavy machinery during business hours no matter what day of the week it is.
I'd be more sympathetic if the constant noise was before 7am or after 9pm but the fact of the mater is that it's not so I'm not.
I felt sorry for them until I got to the part where it said it was the best neighborhood in the city. If that's the case, then I'm sure they can all afford to sue the crap out of the people who are causing this, and they've got plenty of problems that have cost actual money to bring to court already.
The Upper West Side was once a place for middle class intellectuals and artists. These neighbors are not necessarily rich and you need a legal violation to sue. Nothing in this article alleges that the construction is illegal - just very annoying.
This is not in the paper because of rich people. It's in the paper because the article's author lives near the jobsite and is self-interestedly complaining in print.
"But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment)..."
I live in Toronto, where we have Winter season and Construction season. It's everywhere in the city and a noisy construction might just pop up anywhere, poor neighborhood or not.
Dealing with construction noise is relevant to anyone in Toronto regardless of wealth.
If the rich had any other way of dealing with it, I would like to see it in evidence. If the rich have as much recourse as the rest of us, I would like to see it in evidence. The article is relevant regardless of the people depicted being rich.
They're humans like the rest of us and I think it's unfair to write them off without a second thought.
When I lived in Cedar Park, TX, a neighbor decided to dig a swimming pool. That area has about 18" of limestone 1-2' below the surface. The builders used a backhoe with a jackhammer arm. Fun times.
Also, there was a limestone quarry three or four miles away. You could set your clocks: 10:00 and 2:00, the blasting shockwaves went through.
Here in real-world Europe, I have 2 construction sites within 20m of my building applying the same rules. Jackhammer allowed between 8am-7pm, 6 days a week. They stop one hour for siesta time at the nearby kindergarten on weekdays.
How else do you think cities got built in the first place ?
This is not NIMBYism at all as it has nothing to do with new construction. This is more like a HOA problem; a neighbor who paves their garden, paints in garish colors, or decides to run a car repair garage on their porch. None of this rises to planning but it is slightly annoying. The pools will get built and they'll move on to the next reason to complain.
"Only on weekends and the holidays of the politically potent — Christmas and Rosh Hashana, for example, but not Martin Luther King’s Birthday — does it cease."
Why does the author feel obligated to inject race into this story? The author could have said Labor Day instead (which would have been ironic).
Real estate is inherently a race issue in that our country was built upon a system that denied blacks the right to own land for the better part of our history and has continued to make ownership difficult through higher interest rates and other schemes.
Even our esteemed President worked to ensure blacks weren’t given access to real estate in NYC.
Issues like this get press time in the paper of record over other actual issues that impact people who aren’t privileged.
Had a Chicago landlord that rented me top floor on a brownstone and promptly started construction refacing the entire brick facade. Construction workers wake up pretty early.
The funny thing about NYC residents complaining about this kind of thing is if they lived anywhere else for a while and came back then the normal background noise level of the city without construction would seem so loud as to seem unbearable.
It's all just an example of the crazy weird microcosm that NYC is.. everyone living in a bubble of insanity and unable to tell.
I actually rather like visiting Manhattan but a few days is about my limit. Even for people who find ordinary city living quite tolerable, Manhattan takes things up a few notches compared to most places. I lived in Manhattan one summer for an intern position when in grad school (admittedly in a dirtier/more dangerous city than it is today) and pretty much decided I couldn't live there no matter how much money I was offered.
Yeah, I visited NYC last year for a week, and it was so much fun, but I would never ever want to actually live there. I could've done with spending a second week there, though.
Admittedly, I had a bit of a skewed experience on my trip: I was in Manhattan during the day but spent my nights staying with my cousin and her family in Westchester. This meant I didn't get to spend nearly as much time in the city as I wanted to (which is why I wish I had a second week there), but it also limited my exposure to noise and prevented me from getting sick of it.
After a weeklong trip to NYC, I was walking home from the airport thinking how quiet downtown Toronto is and then I started to laugh when I realized that I was walking past a construction crew jackhammering the sidewalk. I guess I just tuned it out.
Perhaps if the rest of the country stopped living their lives entirely within strip malls and parking lots for a few years you’d notice how insane that is.
Construction noise is part of large city life. I live in NYC and you just deal with it. It sucks, but it's limited to business hours so it doesn't affect your evenings or sleep or weekends.
I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others?
Is it that bedrock excavation is unusual and should be outlawed? Is it that there are quieter excavation methods that should be legally enforced? Is it that some board gave approval when they shouldn't have and there was corruption or incompetence? The article doesn't say, so I don't get what this is actually about.
> But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment)
The article was written because the noise is annoying to the journalist that wrote it.
Welcome to NYC. There is construction every other block. And that's not even considering things like the 2nd Ave line construction which creates noise pollution for years on end. Is this news because wealthy people are affected?
I wonder how things would be if NYC allowed construction once every 3 years?
This is (one of several reasons) why I have no desire to ever live in a city. This is one the nice neighborhoods, and it's riddled with unbearable noise.
Is Japan's relationship with new construction healthy? From what I understand houses in Japan are like cars in the west, they depreciate over time. When someone buys an old house they knock it down and build a new one. I can see some value in that, since the houses can be more customized to the owner as opposed to builder basic beige that we get here. But it also means houses aren't built to last which I find kind of sad.
There is loud, obnoxious development going on throughout NYC 24/7. I'm supposed to care only if it's bothering a well off broadway director on the Upper West Side?
Welcome to city-living. If you want peace and quiet, move to the suburbs or the countryside. Spend some of the bajillions you'd save in housing on getting a solid ISP link out to your home, and help your new neighbors get wired up to the 'net while you're at it.
80 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadIn London, lavish basements have become trendy[1], but they don't have to deal with bedrock so close to the surface. The Guardian article only mentions the noise once.
[0]https://nyti.ms/2D2qPOp#permid=31403929
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/07/pool-basement-...
It's only about 10 minutes. Very tongue in cheek, but people really are doing this.
Drill many holes at the boundary, to the desired depth. Right-angle drill to connect the bottoms of the holes. Pull the saw through the holes to cut the sides of the block-columns. Now grab one block-column, lift it with a crane, and use the saw to make horizontal cuts at appropriate intervals to make rock blocks. Ship the blocks upstate, and use them to construct a mausoleum pyramid on your country estate. ~Or send them to your dwarven workshops to make mugs, tables, doors, and thrones.~
A rich of sufficient moxie would also cut new "local bedrock" countertops out of their own basement-quarry and tell all the other riches they know about how great it is to eat off of what used to be the floor of their very own basement, before they cut it out to make two sub-basements.
Jackhammering makes gravel. Quarrying makes usable blocks.
I think the idea is that rather than rotating a power-transfer shaft with a drill bit fixed on the end, you just rotate the drill bit with a "mud motor" and circulate the power-transfer fluid with a pump on the surface. The end of the hole can then proceed in any direction, and the only thing you need to feed down the hole is hydraulic pressure and more length of high-pressure hoses and perhaps data wires to control the bit assembly.
You only need a straight line if you're using the torque on a rigid shaft to transfer power. If you can get the mud-powered drill bit assembly to fit within the bore of the vertical hole, you can drill in any direction you want from the bottom of it. It drills in that direction, and pulls itself into the hole it is boring.
This is only necessary because the stone saw is essentially a cable with high tensile strength coated in tiny bits of diamond. In order to cut, you have to pull the circulating cable through the rock. It's like slicing cheese by putting the cheese on top of a wire and lifting the wire up, rather than by pushing down on it with a knife. Vertical cuts in the rock extend upward from the length of the horizontal drill holes. You are then left with square pillars separated by straight kerf-width grooves.
Now you set anchors in the top of a pillar, and use your crane to apply upward force to counteract the weight of the pillar down to the bottom. Send some decent bearings down to the bottom of the holes, and thread your saw cable down one vertical shaft, around a well-anchored bearing, around three horizontal shafts, around another bearing, and back up an adjacent vertical shaft. Cut through the bottom of the pillar. Stop pulling before you ruin your bearings.
At this point, use the crane to lift the pillar enough to get a lifting jack under it. Now you can work at the surface. Push the pillar up from below with the jack, and cut off the anchor block. Push up more, and cut off height at regular intervals. Some of your blocks will have a quarter of a drill hole on their edges, or anchor bolt holes in them, but most will be as perfect as lasers can make them.
They're already rich so no need for further trade goods at this point. Best to continue to dig deeper... By the way, Dwarffortress is coming to Steam 'soon'.
In addition to that, the same real estate developer built another unsightly building only feet away from 50% of the residents' only view. Resulting in zero privacy, beauty, and sunlight. Not to mention, a 30% decrease in each owner's property valuation.
Fuck Shuster Group.
Jersey City cured me of my desire to ever live in NYC. Parts of NYC are quieter, but there's always noise. The suburbs might be boring, but at least I can WFH without going crazy.
I'd be more sympathetic if the constant noise was before 7am or after 9pm but the fact of the mater is that it's not so I'm not.
https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Househo...
60th.
If you have $10M in a checking account, but choose work at Starbucks as a barista because you like fake Italian names for coffee, you are rich.
If you have no savings or other assets, but earn $150K/year, you are not rich.
Edit: Yes, my gut feeling was that I would be downvoted for asking this, but it's a genuine question. Thanks for correcting me HN </s>.
How about the impoverished little kids of NYC who have to deal with the noise of domestic abuse, gunshots, police sirens, etc.
Or that the total number of people who care for the impoverished is a greater number than the number of people who live on the block?
Seems both are true.
"But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment)..."
I live in Toronto, where we have Winter season and Construction season. It's everywhere in the city and a noisy construction might just pop up anywhere, poor neighborhood or not.
Dealing with construction noise is relevant to anyone in Toronto regardless of wealth.
If the rich had any other way of dealing with it, I would like to see it in evidence. If the rich have as much recourse as the rest of us, I would like to see it in evidence. The article is relevant regardless of the people depicted being rich.
They're humans like the rest of us and I think it's unfair to write them off without a second thought.
Also, there was a limestone quarry three or four miles away. You could set your clocks: 10:00 and 2:00, the blasting shockwaves went through.
Anything else is NIMBYism, and NIMBYism kills progress.
No, it's not. In Europe, construction and related noise is regulated. This shit would not fly here for long.
How else do you think cities got built in the first place ?
Perhaps their previous excavation methods involved hand tools and debt bonded migrant workers.
Increasing value is progress.
Do you not like pools?
Why does the author feel obligated to inject race into this story? The author could have said Labor Day instead (which would have been ironic).
Even our esteemed President worked to ensure blacks weren’t given access to real estate in NYC.
Issues like this get press time in the paper of record over other actual issues that impact people who aren’t privileged.
It's all just an example of the crazy weird microcosm that NYC is.. everyone living in a bubble of insanity and unable to tell.
Admittedly, I had a bit of a skewed experience on my trip: I was in Manhattan during the day but spent my nights staying with my cousin and her family in Westchester. This meant I didn't get to spend nearly as much time in the city as I wanted to (which is why I wish I had a second week there), but it also limited my exposure to noise and prevented me from getting sick of it.
Perhaps if the rest of the country stopped living their lives entirely within strip malls and parking lots for a few years you’d notice how insane that is.
I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others?
Is it that bedrock excavation is unusual and should be outlawed? Is it that there are quieter excavation methods that should be legally enforced? Is it that some board gave approval when they shouldn't have and there was corruption or incompetence? The article doesn't say, so I don't get what this is actually about.
The article was written because the noise is annoying to the journalist that wrote it.
The author lives there.
I wonder how things would be if NYC allowed construction once every 3 years?
I am very happy in my noise-free suburb.
That probably has something to do with the healthier relationship there between the population & new construction.