The Manhattan jail construction site and, to the left, the Chung Pak senior housing facility.
Photo: Matthew Sedacca

David Wallach was walking to his Lower East Side apartment on 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 Chinatown, he watched as a clutch of giant drill rigs across the street bored 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 also caught the attention of bargoers nearby on Baxter Street, who marveled “That’s crazy!” to their friends, their eyes wide. 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. “It’s terrible,” she said of the construction. “The ground shakes. We feel trembling even if we don’t hear it.”

This, it turns out, could be her life for quite a long time. Over the next five-plus years, residents and businesses surrounding the former site of the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs, will have not just their days but now nights, too, filled with earsplitting drilling and vibrations. The project is already running behind schedule: The city is all but guaranteed to blow past its legally mandated deadline to close Rikers Island and replace it with four new jails across the boroughs by 2027. And the 1,040-bed Manhattan jail, which from the outside will resemble a bland office building, looks to be the last of the four, opening in 2032. To meet that target date, Tutor Perini and O&G Industries, the project’s design-build team, have to follow an intense construction schedule that has led to the constant late-night ruckus. Which is why neighbors and local community groups, some of whom have already tried and failed to block the jail’s construction in their backyard through the courts, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday to at least put a stop to the 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 groups suing the Mamdani administration. “At what cost does this come?”

According to an advisory published by the city earlier this month, work and operations on White Street will now stretch from at least 6 a.m. through midnight during the week, with deliveries from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., along with daytime work on Saturdays. To the contractors’ credit, steps are being taken to mitigate the impact on the surrounding community, including installing dust and noise monitors on the site along with the use of sound blankets and noise barriers. Even so, the jail site’s neighbors allege in the new suit, this ramped-up construction schedule is ruining their lives. “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 an affidavit. “It is torture,” he added, doubly so because he’s recovering from treatment for metastatic prostate cancer and needs rest. The nonprofit media-arts center that he co-founded and co-directs, DCTV, is located in the same building, and its audio-recording services, 7 p.m. screenings, and evening classes have become unworkable.

Other plaintiffs have similar horror stories. Per the complaint, 77-year-old Betty Lee and her husband already couldn’t open their windows in the rent-stabilized apartment on Baxter Street because of the noise; now, the couple also has to endure “essentially daylight conditions” all evening under the floodlights. Ping Ai Mei, an 88-year-old woman living at the low-income senior facility, Chung Pak, next to the site, claims health issues from all the demolition dust and says she had to move to a new unit in the building last year. With construction expected deep into the night, Ping worries, the dust and vibrations will only 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 councilmember for the area and co-founder of the local advocacy group Neighbors United Below Canal, which is a plaintiff in the suit. “This is pretty much permanent.”

A rendering of the future Manhattan jail in Chinatown.
Photo: NYC DDC

According to the lawsuit, the city is placing an “excessive burden” on the surrounding community with this new, rushed construction schedule, all to meet an “arbitrary” 2032 completion target. (The city has said keeping to a largely weekday-only schedule during normal working hours would push the deadline to 2034 and add another $340 million to the jail’s estimated price of $3.9 billion, per the suit.) But the work the city sees as necessary to satisfy that self-imposed deadline is also illegal, the suit alleges. Building a new jail, the suit claims, doesn’t meet the legal test that justifies extended after-hours work, which are allowed only on (among other things) projects that are in the interest of public health and safety. The suit also claims the city has violated state environmental law, since the current plan amounts to more than double the intensity and construction period that the jail’s environmental-impact study considered. “This means that the community will be subjected to unbearable noise, dust, overnight glaring lighting, and other construction effects,” the suit claims, “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 would say that shutting the complex as soon as possible would improve the health and safety of all those in custody but also that of the broader public. Fifteen people died while being held there in 2025, and so far this year, four more have. But Stanley Richards, the Correction Department commissioner, has said the trauma from rampant violence stays with people whether they remain at Rikers or not. “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 told Errol Louis prior to his appointment as commissioner. Earlier this month, Dana Kaplan, the administration’s “Close Rikers” czar, told the Amsterdam News the city has a “moral imperative” to get the new jails open as fast as possible so that both people in custody and Department of Correction staff can move to sites with “significantly improved conditions.” “Beginning the after-hours work allows us to be on the fastest timeline possible towards completion,” she said.

Sam Raskin, a mayoral spokesperson, says City Hall will review the lawsuit’s claims. He adds, of course, that “the Mamdani administration is committed to meeting our moral and legal obligations to closing the jails on Rikers Island and transitioning to a safer, more humane borough-based correctional system.” Still, even the people directly involved in the new jail’s construction aren’t oblivious to how their intense, late-night schedule will bedevil the surrounding community for years to come. “It’s not going to be great,” one construction worker responsible for monitoring noise levels told me. “Especially if you’re trying to sleep at these hours.”

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