Chinatown Neighbors Sue to Halt Late-Night Jail Construction

On Tuesday around 8 p.m., photographer David Wallach stopped at the corner of White and Centre Streets in Chinatown and looked up. A cluster of giant drill rigs was boring into the site of Manhattan’s forthcoming 335-foot-tall jail, floodlights raking the night sky. “It’s strange to see construction happening this late at night,” he told Curbed, as the drills’ rat-rat-rat boomed overhead. Bargoers on Baxter Street marveled at the spectacle, and a pair of documentarians leaving a party at Firehouse Cinema filmed it on their phones, one acknowledging it “sucks for the neighbors.”

The neighbors would agree. Alexis, who lives in the back of a Baxter Street rental building, told Curbed the ground shakes: “We feel trembling even if we don’t hear it.” On Wednesday, residents and community groups took the grievance to Manhattan Supreme Court, filing a lawsuit against the Mamdani administration to stop the after-hours work. Some of the plaintiffs had previously tried and failed to block the jail’s construction through the courts.

The project, on the former site of the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs, is one of four borough-based jails meant to replace Rikers Island. According to Curbed, the 1,040-bed facility is the last of the four and is slated to open in 2032, well past the legally mandated 2027 deadline to close Rikers. To hit that date, the design-build team of Tutor Perini and O&G Industries is working an intense schedule. A city advisory published earlier this month says work on White Street will run from at least 6 a.m. through midnight on weekdays, with deliveries from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. and daytime work on Saturdays. Contractors have installed dust and noise monitors, sound blankets and noise barriers.

Plaintiffs say it isn’t enough. Jon Alpert, 77, a documentarian who lives at 87 Lafayette Street, said in an affidavit that the only quiet he gets is the four hours from midnight to 4 a.m. “It is torture,” he wrote, noting he is recovering from treatment for metastatic prostate cancer. DCTV, the nonprofit media-arts center he co-founded, shares the building, and its audio recording, 7 p.m. screenings and evening classes have become unworkable. According to the complaint, 77-year-old Betty Lee and her husband already couldn’t open the windows of their rent-stabilized Baxter Street apartment and now live under “essentially daylight conditions” all evening. Ping Ai Mei, 88, who lives at the low-income Chung Pak senior facility next to the site, claims health problems from demolition dust and says she had to move units last year.

The suit makes two legal arguments. First, it says a new jail doesn’t meet the test that justifies extended after-hours work, which is permitted only for projects such as those serving public health and safety. Second, it alleges a violation of state environmental law, claiming the current plan more than doubles the intensity and duration of construction considered in the jail’s environmental-impact study, with no further review. The suit calls the 2032 target “arbitrary” and describes the burden on the community as “excessive.” Per the suit, the city has said a largely weekday, normal-hours schedule would push completion to 2034 and add $340 million to the jail’s estimated $3.9 billion cost.

Councilmember Christopher Marte, whose district includes the site and who co-founded plaintiff group Neighbors United Below Canal, contrasted the situation with routine utility work. New Yorkers can tolerate a few nights of Con Edison or DEP crews, he told Curbed, because “you know it’s going to end fairly soon. This is pretty much permanent.” Vic Lee, co-founder of the nonprofit Welcome to Chinatown, another plaintiff, put it more bluntly: the city is already going to miss its legal deadline by five years, he said, and that doesn’t mean Chinatown should have to suffer. “At what cost does this come?”