Metro

Tenant: Neighbor’s excessive noise causes 9/11 flashbacks

A Queens co-op resident is so fed up with the woman who lives upstairs that he’s calling her the Osama bin Laden of “excessive” and “intentional” noise, according to a bizarre new lawsuit.

“As a result of the excessive noise,” he has “flashbacks regarding his time working near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001,” tender-eared Brian Hochberg is charging in the suit that was filed in Queens Supreme Court.

Hochberg, 51, is convinced that the woman upstairs sets an alarm clock so that she can wake him up in the middle of the night by banging on her floor, moving furniture back and forth, rolling unspecified “equipment” around, and generating “other loud noises that could be heard in Hochberg’s apartment,” according to the lawsuit.

The allegedly noisy woman, though, has this to say about Hochberg, whom she has lived above at the Windsor Court co-op in Richmand Hill since 2007: “God forbid if I drop a fork.”

“I feel bad for him,” Maria Vergara, a petite, 36-year-old brunette, told The Post. “I spent a lot of time praying for this man.”

In one corner of the bizarre noise fight is Hochberg, a balding, slightly paunchy IT honcho for the city housing authority.

Hochberg lives on the second floor, and is treasurer of the co-op board. In his spare time, he tutors released felons for the Fortune Society.

In the other corner is Vergana, a university contract specialist who, judging from her size, would have a hard time moving furniture larger than an end table.

According to Hochberg’s suit, the two lived in relative harmony, one above the other in the Tudor-style brick building on 116th Street, for years.

Then, in September 2011, inexplicably, Vergana allegedly suddenly began “making loud noise in her apartment,” the suit charges.

Hochberg says in his suit that he knocked and left a note. When both gestures went unacknowledged, he complained to the co-op board, he says.

The superintendent then visited Vergana, informing her, “that she did not have the percentage of carpeting in her apartment which was required by the terms of an agreement between the co-operative and the Defendant,” the suit says.

That’s when Vergana allegedly went on her bin Laden-like noise jihad, the suit charges — allegedly timing her audio assaults to whenever she heard that that he was home downstairs.

“Hochberg has been forced to inhabit his home in an extremely quiet manner, including by watching television with headphones and by tiptoeing around the apartment, so that Defendant would not know that he was home and make noise,” the suit reads.

“Hochberg has also been forced to purchase food outside his home, as the noise caused by his cooking in his apartment informs Defendant of his presence in his apartment,” he claims.

Vergana, on the other hand, remembers things differently, saying that Hochberg now glares at her at the bus stop. “He has been harassing me,” she complained. “He left me letters. He banged on my door once. He yelled, ‘Stop picking up dumbbells and dropping the on the floor!’”

Last Thanksgiving, she told The Post, “I had my 85-year-old grandmother, my 67-year-old mother and my 62-year-old aunt over for dinner. He went crazy! He was banging on his ceiling like a crazy person! How much noise can an old person make? Nobody was even wearing shoes!”

Hochberg declined through his attorney to speak to The Post; an attorney for the property management company, Abbey Goldstein, conceded, “Claims of nuisance by one resident against another are not uncommon, and the board of directors is often placed in the unfortunate position of trying to determine the truth of widely diverging claims by the parties involved.”

Hochberg — who other tenants, asking to remain anonymous, described variously as “strange,” “nasty,” and “rude,” — is seeking unspecified damages.