This article was originally published on October 21, 2026. On October 26, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge issued a ruling that temporarily halted late-night construction on the new jail in Chinatown.
David Wallach was walking to his Lower East Side apartment on a Tuesday around 8 p.m. when he craned his neck up at 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 deep into the site of the borough’s forthcoming 335-foot-tall jail.
“It’s strange to see construction happening this late at night,” the photographer said, his thoughts interrupted by the drills’ booming rat-rat-rat.
The operation quickly caught the attention of bargoers nearby on Baxter Street, who marveled “That’s crazy!” to their friends, their eyes wide with disbelief. A pair of documentarians leaving a party at Firehouse Cinema immediately whipped out their phones and stood in the middle of the street, recording the cacophony as floodlight-illuminated drills and cranes lumbered against the night sky. Which, one of them acknowledged, “sucks for the neighbors.”
Alexis, who is one such neighbor and lives in the back of a rental building on Baxter Street, agreed entirely with that assessment.
“It’s terrible,” she said of the relentless construction. “The ground shakes. We feel trembling even if we don’t hear it.”
This, it turns out, could be the daily and nightly reality for local residents for quite a long time. Over the next five-plus years, residents and businesses surrounding the former site of the Manhattan Detention Complex, historically known as the Tombs, will have not just their days, but now their nights as well, filled with earsplitting drilling and persistent structural vibrations.
The project is already running significantly behind schedule. The city is all but guaranteed to blow past its legally mandated deadline to close the troubled correctional facility on Rikers Island and replace it with four new borough-based jails across the city by 2027. Meanwhile, the planned 1,040-bed Manhattan jail—which from the outside will resemble a bland corporate office building—looks to be the last of the four facilities to finish, with an anticipated opening date in 2032.
To meet that target completion date, Tutor Perini and O&G Industries, the project’s design-build team, have been forced to follow an intense construction schedule that has directly resulted in the constant late-night ruckus. Frustrated by the noise and disruption, local neighbors and community groups—some of whom have already tried and failed to block the jail’s construction in their backyard through various legal challenges—filed a fresh lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court to at least put a temporary and permanent stop 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 the business-boosting nonprofit Welcome to Chinatown, which is one of the key groups suing the 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, accompanied by early-morning material deliveries from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., alongside mandatory daytime work on Saturdays.
To the contractors’ credit, steps are being taken to mitigate the impact on the surrounding community. These measures include installing advanced dust and noise monitors directly on the site, along with the deployment of sound blankets and heavy-duty noise barriers. Even so, the jail site’s neighbors allege in the new lawsuit that this ramped-up, aggressive construction schedule is effectively ruining their quality of life.
“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, said in a court affidavit.
“It is torture,” he added, noting that the disruption is doubly stressful because he is currently recovering from ongoing medical treatments for metastatic prostate cancer and desperately needs proper rest. Furthermore, the nonprofit media-arts center that he co-founded and co-directs, DCTV, is located in the exact same building. As a result, its audio-recording services, 7 p.m. public screenings, and evening educational classes have become virtually unworkable under the current conditions.
Other local plaintiffs share similarly harrowing stories. According to the filed complaint, 77-year-old Betty Lee and her husband already found it difficult to open the windows in their rent-stabilized apartment on Baxter Street due to daytime neighborhood noise. Now, the couple also has to endure “essentially daylight conditions” all evening long under the blinding glare of the site’s massive floodlights.
Meanwhile, Ping Ai Mei, an 88-year-old resident living at the low-income senior housing facility Chung Pak, situated right next to the construction site, has reported experiencing persistent health issues resulting from heavy demolition dust. She claimed she was forced to move to a completely new unit within the building last year to escape the worst of it. With construction expected to push deep into the night for years to come, Ping worries that the dust, noise, and structural vibrations will only continue to worsen.
“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 city councilmember representing the area and a co-founder of the local advocacy group Neighbors United Below Canal, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “This is pretty much permanent.”
According to the legal filing, the city is placing an “excessive burden” on the surrounding community with this new, rushed construction schedule, all in the name of meeting an “arbitrary” 2032 completion target. Public records indicate that keeping to a more traditional, weekday-only schedule during normal working hours would push the final completion deadline out to 2034 and add another $340 million to the jail’s estimated price tag of $3.9 billion, per the suit.
However, the intensive work that the city views as fundamentally necessary to satisfy that self-imposed deadline is also illegal, the lawsuit alleges. Building a new detention facility, the suit claims, does not meet the specific legal tests that justify extended after-hours work variances, which are generally restricted to projects directly tied to immediate public health and safety emergencies.
The lawsuit additionally claims that the city has violated core state environmental laws, arguing that the current round-the-clock plan amounts to more than double the intensity and duration of construction activity that was considered 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 Rikers Island argue that shutting the notorious complex as rapidly as possible is vital to improving the health and safety of both those in custody and the broader public. Fifteen people died while being held at Rikers in 2025, and additional deaths have been recorded this year.
Stanley Richards, the Correction Department commissioner, has previously noted that the deep trauma resulting from rampant institutional violence stays with individuals long after they leave, whether they remain at Rikers or return to their neighborhoods.
“New York has been living with a system that has been horrible to people who are incarcerated there and the communities that they come from, because they end up coming back to the community worse off than they did before they left,” he noted prior to his appointment.
Earlier this month, Dana Kaplan, the administration’s “Close Rikers” czar, told the press that the city holds a “moral imperative” to get the new borough-based jails open as quickly as possible so that both incarcerated individuals and Department of Correction staff can finally move to sites featuring significantly improved physical and operational conditions.
“Beginning the after-hours work allows us to be on the fastest timeline possible towards completion,” she said.
Sam Raskin, a mayoral spokesperson, stated that City Hall is currently reviewing the claims made in the lawsuit. He added that the administration remains fully committed to meeting its moral and legal obligations to close the correctional facilities on Rikers Island and successfully transition the city toward a safer, more humane borough-based correctional system.
Still, even individuals directly involved in the planning and execution of the new jail’s construction are well aware of how the intense, late-night schedule will disrupt the surrounding community for years to come.
“It’s not going to be great,” one construction worker responsible for monitoring noise levels conceded. “Especially if you’re trying to sleep at these hours.”
