Center City Man Furious at H&M’s Late Night Construction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_4OnLz-ec
The Daily News’ Ronnie Polaneczky has a column today about Ivan Valentine’s war with H&M. The company has been rehabbing its 15th and Chestnut store, and Valentine says much of the work goes on at night — and has been keeping him up.
Nonemergency construction noise in the city is permitted between only 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays and between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekends. At the H&M store, though, the ear-piercing scrape of metal on metal and the clunking dump of debris happens throughout the wee hours.
“They wheel in a giant metal dumpster almost every night and load it sometimes until 4 a.m. and then start again around 6 a.m. when I’ve just begun to sleep,” says Ivan Valentine, who lives with his wife in a six-floor apartment building across the street from the racket (and next to – get this – Insomnia Cookies). “I have lost so much sleep that I had to call in sick to work one day so I could rest.”
Valentine even has a series of late-night construction videos on YouTube! (I feel bad for the guy, so I won’t complain too much about them being shot vertically.)
Polaneczky basically says there’s nothing Valentine can do, though the H&M site was fined $300 — or about 30 H&M polos — for one noise violation by the city’s Air Management department.
