A year ago, when Lilia Stroker and her young family moved into the Riverhouse — a tony Battery Park City condo with sprawling $6 million pads — she was expecting an oasis: rest, relaxation and a respite from the din of city living.
That is, until the horn blasts started. All day, every day, from 6 a.m. until 10 at night, there is relentless ferry honking — and a noisy assault on her family’s quality of life.
“The blasts sound like they’re in the apartment, it’s so loud,” says the 39-year-old photographer, who lives with her husband and two daughters — a 2-year-old and a 9-week-old. “The worst part is never knowing when it’s going to strike — I’m panicked about getting sleep every night.”
Though a US Coast Guard navigation rule has been on the books for more than 40 years, stipulating that every vessel that leaves or enters port blast its horn for an initial four to six seconds followed by three quick blasts, the regulation hasn’t been enforced in years.
That is, until one kayak crusader, Nancy Brous, who’s on the board of the Hudson River Watertrail Association, decided to take action.
Last summer, she insisted that NY Waterway ferries — the commuter ferries that mostly shuttle commuters from downtown New York to New Jersey — start honking up to code.
“[Before] these ferries would [silently] back out of the terminals — and come shooting out. It’s dangerous for anyone, not just kayakers and paddle-boarders,” she says. “If the vessels don’t blast, nobody knows they’re coming. It’s not hard [to signal], and it’s the law. I’ve noticed in the last several weeks they’ve been blasting all the time. I’m happy about it — it makes a big difference.”
With about 250 ferry trips a day on NY Waterway vessels alone, that’s a lot of honking.
Predictably, this move outraged put-upon Battery Park residents, including many families.
On edge over her newborn’s sleeplessness — “It was breaking my heart that this poor 3-week-old baby was crying all morning out of frustration because she couldn’t sleep” — Stroker decided to confront the captain who “honks with a vengeance.”
One morning, when she spotted the NY Waterway ferry coming into port in front of her home, she boarded the ferry and explained the ear-splitting 100-plus decibels in her apartment every time the ship honked.
He explained the high stakes: He could get fined and lose his job for not honking.
Now, Stroker is part of a bloc that’s outraged over the NY Waterway’s perceived inflexibility to switch to flash signals — which, the bloc’s opponents point out, aren’t a realistic safety measure for vessels closed in by slips — or redirect the horn blasts from land to sea. The residents have appealed to elected officials, and the ferries have become a hot topic of conversation at community board meetings.
“I’ve seen kayakers maybe five times,” says Stroker. “If anyone heard what it was like, they’d never stand for it.”
The ringleader for peeved people who live at the Riverhouse is Wolfgang Gabler, who says exasperated residents at the 243-unit complex are fed up and fleeing the exclusive condo for quieter shores. The 51-year-old producer-turned-activist will likely join them: “Most probably, we will not stay in the area; we have such a desire for tranquility.”
Monica Schroeder isn’t convinced. The 52-year-old kayak and sailing instructor maintains that the only noise pollution here is from put-upon elites.
“I live two blocks from the firehouse in Long Island City. I’m not going to call and tell them to stop making noise,” Schroeder says.
And NY Waterway officials are shedding no waterworks for aggrieved parties.
“There may be greater enforcement, but there’s no new law here,” says Paul Goodman, CEO of NY Waterway, who claims captains can and will be fined up to $5,000 and stripped of their licenses if they fail to honk.
Meanwhile, Brous has become the public face of the controversy, painted as a sort of reviled hall monitor who just won’t quit. She even had to file a police complaint last fall after allegedly enduring threats, harassment and intimidation.
“I got a lot of hate e-mail [saying] that I deserve to be hit, verbal harassment in the water — I was afraid,” says the 46-year-old West Village resident.
“People have a sense of entitlement because they have these expensive apartments. But don’t tell people that they should ignore safety regulations because you don’t want to be woken up. You have all this money — move someplace else and go inland.”
One Goldman Sachs executive, who lives in the Riverhouse and asked to remain anonymous, sounds off on the crisis: “For 30 years, they felt it wasn’t a safety thing. Now one kayaker complains, and it is a safety thing? I don’t buy it!”