A few weeks ago, on my usual walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park, I took a detour to the bathroom, only to be confronted by two metal barricades and a sign: “RESTROOMS TEMPORARILY CLOSED.” I felt a bit skeptical about the “temporarily” business because, to my best recollection, the bathrooms had been shuttered for years. I vaguely recalled a 2023 story in The City about the man who lived in the condo directly over the bathrooms. He had sued Brooklyn Bridge Park because he found the toilets too noisy. Was that why the bathrooms were barricaded?

A quick search turned up the lawsuit: Salim Samaha vs. Brooklyn Bridge Park. The filings relating to the Brooklyn Supreme Court case included 382 motions, exhibits, depositions, audio reports, affidavits from plumbers, toilet spec sheets, doctor’s notes, property deeds, photos, operating agreements, and park maps dating back to September 2020. And yes, the case was still in progress.

I emailed the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, the nonprofit that operates the park, to ask what was going on. Its response didn’t reveal much: “In fall 2020,” a spokesperson wrote, “the public restrooms at this location were required to close due to pending litigation.” They added, “We do not believe the operation of this restroom violates the New York City noise code, and we remain committed to keeping this public restroom in a public park open. The litigation is ongoing, and we look forward to its resolution.”

Salim Samaha’s duplex condo is directly next to and over the public restroom.
Photo: Anne Kadet

For now, it looked like I would have to dig through six years of legal documents to understand what had happened. Had a noise dispute brought by a single resident of a Brooklyn luxury complex really shut down a public bathroom for all that time?

It all started in 2019, shortly after Salim Samaha moved into the 4,700-square-foot duplex at the Pierhouse, a new, 106-unit luxury condo building abutting Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Pierhouse, along with Quay Tower and the Landing, is one of the few luxury condo buildings directly overlooking the park, not tucked behind the Promenade or BQE. Each of the units have spectacular, protected views of the Manhattan skyline and private terraces, drawing celebrity buyers such as Kendrick Lamar and Ed Sheeran. Along with a pet spa, meditation studio, and valet parking, the two-building complex houses a set of public restrooms accessible from the park, which the condo developer was required by the state to include.

The Pierhouse borders the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Photo: Corcoran

The records don’t say whether Samaha noticed that the five-bedroom, four-bath duplex he had purchased for $4.95 million was situated over a public restroom (though there is a large “RESTROOMS” sign on the side of the building), or whether, upon touring the unit, he heard all the flushing going on downstairs. The suit only contends that Samaha “did not have notice of the excessive and frequent noise,” including “banging of toilet stall doors, hand-dryer sounds and banging when the park employees operate doors in the storage room.” Within a few weeks of moving in, Samaha complained to the condo-board president, who forwarded the new resident’s grievances to the building developer and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The developer, Toll Brothers, responded by soundproofing the bathroom — but apparently that was not enough. In November 2019, Samaha hired SoundSense, a sound-engineering company, to perform acoustical testing in his duplex. SoundSense reported that the toilet flushing was loud enough to violate city noise ordinances. According to court documents, the BBPC and Toll Brothers responded by agreeing to perform additional remediation work. Starting in March 2020, the park closed the bathrooms for a major reconstruction, which took longer than expected. In a later deposition, Samaha’s lawyer asked BBPC president Eric Landau, “Were there any issues with the work in the spring of 2020 as the work progressed?” “Just the global pandemic,” Landau replied.

The project, completed four months later, included demolishing and rebuilding the interior plumbing walls to add rubberized soundproofing, installing insulation to the walls and ceiling, supporting the pipes with rubber-coated hangers and relocating the hand dryers. Meanwhile, Pierhouse residents were complaining that parkgoers who needed to use the restroom were now urinating (and “possibly defecating,” Landau later testified) outside the building.

Brooklyn Bridge Park submitted photos of people urinating in public as evidence that park goers were affected by the bathroom closure.
Photo: Kings County Clerk

Everyone was relieved when the bathrooms reopened that summer. But not for long. Samaha, who was not satisfied, hired SoundSense to perform a second test and, based on the results, had his lawyer tell the park that the sound levels were still in violation. In a rather terse reply, BBPC noted that the public restrooms “were in existence and operating for approximately one year prior to your client’s purchase of the unit” and that the park had done its best to address Samaha’s concerns. “The restrooms must remain open to the public during the park’s operating hours,” it concluded. And that’s when Samaha sued.

“BBPC has created a nuisance which continues to injure my family by degrading our sleep and quality of life, causing us to suffer from loss of the use and enjoyment of our apartment, and irreparably harming us,” Samaha stated in his complaint. He seems to have been particularly aggravated by the events of September 2: “We were kept awake all night by a toilet in the lavatory that BBPC allowed to continually flush throughout the night, most likely due to a faulty motion sensor on the toilet.” His complaint was accompanied by a doctor’s note: “After many months of complaints and some reported mitigation attempts by the park administration, Mr. Samaha and his family are still reporting severe sleep disturbance,” the doctor wrote. Samaha demanded an immediate shutdown of both the men’s and ladies’ restrooms, along with the storage room, and the judge ruled in his favor.

In New York, where residents are stacked on top of and besides one another, there’s a base-level expectation that living here requires tolerating a fair amount of noise. We endure roaring trucks, endless construction, and most of all our neighbors, stomping up the stairs, watching shows at full volume, and doing who knows what at all hours. But it’s also not unusual for noise disputes to get heated and drag on for years, says Alan Fierstein, president of acoustic-consulting service Acoustilog. In New York City, he said, “Property prices are so expensive they figure after they buy it that they are entitled to peace and quiet, and when they can’t get that peace and quiet, it’s frustrating.” The typical public toilet, he added, could be four times as loud (20 decibels higher) as a toilet installed in a private home. If the soundproofing was indeed insufficient, “Could it keep someone up? Yes. Could it drive someone crazy? Yeah, it could drive someone crazy.”

It was hard to tell from the legal documents alone whether Samaha had a legitimate gripe. Requests for comment through his lawyer and his building desk attendant produced no response. The Pierhouse condo board and management company, meanwhile, declined to reply to questions about whether other residents had complained about the noise. What I did know about Samaha, from the court records, is that he had moved into the duplex with his wife, his mother-in-law, and a young child — so the situation wasn’t just about him. His LinkedIn profile shows he works as a partner at Global Infrastructure Partners, a division of BlackRock (the world’s largest asset manager with more than $15 trillion under management), where he oversees several natural-gas industry funds. He also sits on the boards of Rio Grande LNG and Columbia Pipeline, two of the nation’s largest natural gas projects. In sum, he has a lot on his plate. It’s hard to imagine he’d expend so much energy addressing a mild annoyance.

In September 2020, the park objected to the court’s bathroom closure, filing a motion that said it “deprives the public of a crucial sanitary facility in a heavily trafficked and vital public open space during a pandemic.” It asked the judge to reopen the restrooms pending a DEP sound inspection. Two months later, the judge reopened the bathrooms but reduced operating hours to between 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. (they were previously open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.). The judge also ordered Samaha to let the DEP in for the inspection.

View of the Pierhouse complex from Squibb Park Bridge.
Photo: Anne Kadet

A week later, the DEP inspectors arrived at Samaha’s duplex to do a noise-level check. Samaha invited SoundSense back to conduct its own test at the same time. Teams for both parties measured the noise created by the flushing toilets, hand dryers, and gates. What happened next provided fodder for years of courtroom disputes. The DEP’s conclusion? “There was no unreasonable noise noted or detected at the time of inspection.” SoundSense, meanwhile, reported that the decibel levels “constituted violations of the NYC Noise Code.”

How could the two inspection teams arrive at opposite conclusions? I sent both reports to Fierstein. It’s not unusual to see conflicting results, he said. Moving the microphone just a few inches could yield very different readings. And whether a sudden sound like a flushing toilet exceeds legal limits depends on how it compares to the background noise level: It must be at least 15 decibels higher, which is subjectively three times as loud. That’s possible with a public toilet, said Fierstein. But if the flush was measured when, say, a truck was roaring by, the decibel difference might not register as a violation.

Samaha saw darker forces at play. Four months later, in April 2021, he requested the judge to find the DEP in contempt of court, claiming that the department’s noise inspectors had fudged the results and then orchestrated a cover-up. The DEP, meanwhile, asked the court for a protective order against Samaha’s legal team to stop its “pattern of abusive discovery tactics against the DEP,” claiming that it was subjecting city inspectors to unnecessary legal depositions “merely for the plaintiffs’ ongoing fishing expedition.” The BBPC requested access to Samaha’s duplex for an inspection by its own acoustical expert.

It took the courts two years to sort out all the demands and related evidence. In a series of orders leading up to a planned November 2023 trial date, a judge declined Samaha’s demands to find the DEP in contempt of court and also declined to grant BBPC’s acoustical expert access to Samaha’s duplex. And then, just when it seemed things couldn’t get more contentious, both parties abruptly canceled the scheduled trial. They wanted to settle.

January 2024 looked like the beginning of the end. That’s when the judge approved a settlement reached by the two parties after several months of negotiations. Both agreed that BBPC would pay for a second remediation job. When it was completed, acoustical experts hired by both sides would verify that the job matched the settlement’s specifications and that the noise had been reduced to legal levels. If their experts disagreed, Wilson Ihrig, a national acoustical-consulting firm, would step in as a neutral third party and have the final say.

The bathrooms were closed again and the job — which included installing a new bathroom ceiling and a new sound-isolation wall between the bathroom and the lower level of Samaha’s duplex — was completed by May 2024. With one exception: the settlement called for acoustic waffle padding between the toilets and the wall to muffle the sound, but BBPC’s contractor refused to install the padding, stating that the toilet manufacturer’s instructions did not allow for padding behind the toilet. In a sworn statement, he said he could not install the padding without violating city plumbing code and risking his license.

The waffle padding seemed like a minor detail in the overall scheme of things. When I asked Alan Fierstein to calculate how much the padding would add to the overall cost of the two remediation jobs, he estimated it might have added $2,000 to $3,000 to what might be a $200,000 to $500,000 project: “It’s not a big job,” he said, adding, “I don’t know if it would work at all.”

But both sides dug in their heels. In a series of letters exchanged over the next 18 months, Samaha’s lawyer argued that “BBPC was never genuinely interested in finding a workable fix, but rather was focused on avoiding its obligations altogether,” while the BBPC’s attorney said Samaha’s insistence on the waffle pads was “a ploy to prevent BBPC from finishing the work and reopening the public restrooms.” Another impasse.

In August 2024, while the battle of the waffle pads raged on, Samaha got a break. A state appellate court ruling forced the BBPC to close the bathrooms again until it could prove they were not violating the noise code. The BBPC says it has not been able to prove anything because Samaha still hasn’t granted access to its expert for sound testing.

And so the bathrooms have been barricaded ever since. While there are five other restrooms in Brooklyn Bridge Park, it’s an 85-acre green space that stretches 1.3 miles along the shoreline and attracts 5 million visitors a year. On nice days, there are often lines at the other bathrooms.

But there may be an end soon. On April 21, a judge issued a handwritten ruling ordering both sides to take their dispute to Wilson Ihrig, the neutral consulting firm. According to the park, the parties are now in the process of arranging for joint sound testing overseen by the firm, which is expected to take place this September — just in time for the end of summer.

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