David Wallach was walking back to his Lower East Side apartment on a Tuesday evening around 8 p.m. when he craned his neck to witness one of Lower Manhattan’s latest after-hours spectacles. At the corner of White and Centre Streets in the heart of Chinatown, he watched as a clutch of giant drill rigs across the street bored into the footprint of the borough’s forthcoming 335-foot-tall jail facility.
"It’s strange to see construction happening this late at night," the photographer said, his observations abruptly interrupted by the booming, rhythmic rat-rat-rat of the heavy drills.
The heavy operation immediately caught the attention of patrons enjoying drinks nearby at bargoers’ spots on Baxter Street, who turned to each other and marveled, "That’s crazy!" Their eyes widened as a pair of documentarians, leaving a gathering at the nearby Firehouse Cinema, whipped out their phones and stood right in the middle of the street, recording the booming cacophony while floodlight-illuminated drills and lumbering cranes operated against the darkened night sky. As one of them acknowledged to the crowd, it certainly "sucks for the neighbors."
Alexis, who is one of those neighbors and lives in the rear unit of a residential rental building on Baxter Street, echoed that sentiment with pure frustration.
"It’s terrible," she said of the relentless construction. "The ground shakes. We feel trembling even if we don’t hear it."
This unsettling environment, it turns out, could become their daily and nightly reality for a prolonged period. Over the next five-plus years, residents, families, and local small businesses surrounding the former site of the Manhattan Detention Complex—historically known as the Tombs—will face a landscape where not just their days, but now their nights, are consumed by earsplitting drilling, heavy machinery, and constant low-frequency vibrations.
The ambitious municipal project is already running significantly behind schedule. The city is all but guaranteed to blow past its legally mandated deadline to close the notorious jail complex on Rikers Island and replace it with four modern borough-based facilities across New York City by 2027. The massive 1,040-bed Manhattan jail, which from the exterior will resemble a rather bland corporate glass-and-steel office building, now looks to be the very last of the four projects to cross the finish line, with a projected opening date pushed out to 2032.
To meet that aggressive target date, Tutor Perini and O&G Industries, the joint design-build team heading the project, are forced to adhere to an intense, round-the-clock construction schedule. That pace has directly triggered the constant late-night ruckus that has rattled the surrounding community. Frustrated by the noise and the toll it is taking on daily life, local neighbors and community advocacy groups—some of whom have already tried and failed to block the construction of the jail in their backyard through various legal avenues over the years—filed a formal lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court to put an immediate halt to the disruptive after-hours work.
"They’re already going to miss the legal deadline by five years. That doesn’t mean that Chinatown should have to suffer," says Vic Lee, a co-founder of Welcome to Chinatown, a business-boosting nonprofit that stands as one of the key groups joining the lawsuit against the city administration. "At what cost does this come?"
According to an official advisory published by the city earlier this month, heavy work and active operations on White Street will now stretch from at least 6 a.m. through midnight during the workweek, supplemented by early morning truck deliveries from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., along with mandatory daytime work schedules on Saturdays. To the credit of the contractors involved, various mitigation steps have been deployed to lessen the impact on the immediate neighborhood. These measures include the installation of specialized dust and noise monitors across the site, alongside the deployment of heavy sound blankets and temporary noise barriers.
Even with those mitigation efforts in place, the jail site’s closest neighbors allege in the newly filed lawsuit that the ramped-up construction schedule is fundamentally ruining their standard of living and destroying their peace of mind.
"The only time that I am now able to sleep with no noise or disruption is for the four hours from midnight to 4 a.m.," Jon Alpert, a 77-year-old documentarian who lives at 87 Lafayette Street, stated in a sworn affidavit.
"It is torture," he added, noting that the suffering is doubly severe because he is currently recovering from medical treatments for metastatic prostate cancer and desperately requires deep, uninterrupted rest. Furthermore, the nonprofit media-arts center that he co-founded and co-directs, DCTV, is housed in the very same building. Because of the heavy construction, its community audio-recording services, popular 7 p.m. film screenings, and evening educational classes have effectively become unworkable.
Other plaintiffs named in the legal complaint share similar horror stories of disruption and distress. According to the court documents, 77-year-old Betty Lee and her husband were already forced to keep their windows permanently sealed in their rent-stabilized Baxter Street apartment due to the daytime noise. Now, the aging couple must also endure "essentially daylight conditions" throughout the evening hours under the harsh glare of the site’s towering construction floodlights.
Meanwhile, Ping Ai Mei, an 88-year-old resident living at the Chung Pak low-income senior housing facility located directly adjacent to the construction site, has reported severe health issues stemming from the heavy demolition dust. She noted that the conditions forced her to relocate to a completely different unit within the building last year. With construction activities now slated to push deep into the night, Ping worries that the persistent dust and building vibrations will only continue to escalate.
"We all live in New York City, and we all have experienced, for, like, two or three days, Con Edison or DEP doing some late-night work, but you know it’s going to end fairly soon," says Christopher Marte, the local city councilmember for the district and a co-founder of the neighborhood advocacy group Neighbors United Below Canal, which is also serving as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. "This is pretty much permanent."
The lawsuit argues directly that the city is placing an "excessive burden" on the surrounding community by instituting this new, rushed construction schedule, all in service of meeting what they describe as an "arbitrary" 2032 completion target. Public records and court filings indicate that maintaining a more traditional weekday-only schedule during standard working hours would push the final completion deadline out to 2034 and add an estimated $340 million to the jail’s already staggering $3.9 billion price tag.
However, the plaintiffs claim that the extended work hours being enforced by the city are entirely illegal. The legal filing asserts that constructing a new correctional facility fails to meet the stringent legal tests that typically justify granting permits for extended after-hours work, which are generally reserved for emergency projects or operations explicitly proven to be in the immediate interest of public health and safety. Additionally, the lawsuit contends that the municipal government has violated state environmental quality laws, arguing that the current round-the-clock plan amounts to more than double the intensity and duration of construction initially evaluated in the jail’s original environmental-impact study.
"This means that the community will be subjected to unbearable noise, dust, overnight glaring lighting, and other construction effects," the lawsuit states, "yet the City has not conducted any further environmental review to consider the impacts to the surrounding community as a result of this new around-the-clock construction schedule."
Advocates for closing the notoriously troubled facilities on Rikers Island maintain a different perspective on the urgent timeline. Supporters of the closure argue that shutting the complex down as swiftly as possible is paramount to protecting the basic health, human rights, and safety of both the individuals held in custody and the broader public. Fifteen people died while incarcerated at Rikers in 2025 alone, and multiple fatalities have continued to mount.
Stanley Richards, the Department of Correction commissioner, has previously noted that the psychological trauma resulting from rampant institutional violence stays with individuals long after they leave the island. Before his official appointment as commissioner, Richards emphasized the systemic failures of the current setup to local media figures, pointing out that New York has long endured a correctional framework that harms vulnerable populations and returns them to their home neighborhoods in worse condition than when they left.
Earlier this month, Dana Kaplan, the administration’s designated "Close Rikers" czar, told the press that the city maintains a clear "moral imperative" to open the new borough-based facilities as rapidly as possible. Doing so, she argued, would allow both incarcerated individuals and Department of Correction staff to transition out of decaying infrastructure and into modern sites featuring significantly improved conditions.
"Beginning the after-hours work allows us to be on the fastest timeline possible towards completion," Kaplan stated regarding the schedule adjustments.
Sam Raskin, a mayoral spokesperson, indicated that City Hall intends to thoroughly review the claims brought forward in the lawsuit. He reaffirmed the administration’s overarching policy stance, noting that the mayor’s office remains fully committed to meeting both moral and legal obligations to close the jails on Rikers Island and successfully transition the city toward a safer, more humane correctional system based within the boroughs.
Yet, even among those directly involved in executing the massive construction project, there is little illusion about the reality of the situation. Field personnel acknowledge that the intense, late-night schedule will inevitably disrupt the surrounding neighborhood for years to come.
As one construction worker tasked with monitoring on-site noise levels put it bluntly, "It’s not going to be great—especially if you’re trying to sleep at these hours."
