![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fc840f87c1846fb927b69019c32d7fbe1c-Restrooms-with-gate.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, on my usual walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park<\/a>, I took a detour to the bathroom, only to be confronted by two metal barricades and a sign: \u201cRESTROOMS TEMPORARILY CLOSED.\u201d I felt a bit skeptical about the \u201ctemporarily\u201d business because, to my best recollection, the bathrooms had been shuttered for years. I vaguely recalled a 2023 story in The City<\/a> 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s notes, property deeds, photos, operating agreements, and park maps dating back to September 2020. And yes, the case was still in progress.<\/p>\n I emailed the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, the nonprofit that operates the park, to ask what was going on. Its response didn\u2019t reveal much: \u201cIn fall 2020,\u201d a spokesperson wrote, \u201cthe public restrooms at this location were required to close due to pending litigation.\u201d They added, \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Salim Samaha\u2019s duplex condo is directly next to and over the public restroom. 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?<\/p>\n It all started in 2019, shortly after Salim Samaha moved into the\u00a04,700-square-foot duplex at the Pierhouse<\/a>, a new, 106-unit luxury condo building abutting Brooklyn Bridge Park<\/a>. The Pierhouse, along with Quay Tower<\/a> and the Landing<\/a>, 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<\/a> and Ed Sheeran<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n \n The Pierhouse borders the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park. The records don\u2019t 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 \u201cRESTROOMS\u201d 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 \u201cdid not have notice of the excessive and frequent noise,\u201d including \u201cbanging of toilet stall doors, hand-dryer sounds and banging when the park employees operate doors in the storage room.\u201d Within a few weeks of moving in, Samaha complained to the condo-board president, who forwarded the new resident\u2019s grievances to the building developer and Brooklyn Bridge Park.<\/p>\n The developer, Toll Brothers, responded by soundproofing the bathroom \u2014 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\u2019s lawyer asked BBPC president Eric Landau, \u201cWere there any issues with the work in the spring of 2020 as the work progressed?\u201d \u201cJust the global pandemic,\u201d Landau replied.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cpossibly defecating,\u201d Landau later testified) outside the building.<\/p>\n \n Brooklyn Bridge Park submitted photos of people urinating in public as evidence that park goers were affected by the bathroom closure. 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 \u201cwere in existence and operating for approximately one year prior to your client\u2019s purchase of the unit\u201d and that the park had done its best to address Samaha\u2019s concerns. \u201cThe restrooms must remain open to the public during the park\u2019s operating hours,\u201d it concluded. And that\u2019s when Samaha sued.<\/p>\n \u201cBBPC 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,\u201d Samaha stated in his complaint. He seems to have been particularly aggravated by the events of September 2: \u201cWe 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.\u201d His complaint was accompanied by a doctor\u2019s note: \u201cAfter many months of complaints and some reported mitigation attempts by the park administration, Mr. Samaha and his family are still reporting severe sleep disturbance,\u201d the doctor wrote. Samaha demanded an immediate shutdown of both the men\u2019s and ladies\u2019 restrooms, along with the storage room, and the judge ruled in his favor.<\/p>\n In New York, where residents are stacked on top of and besides one another, there\u2019s 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\u2019s also not unusual for noise disputes to get heated and drag on for years<\/a>, says Alan Fierstein, president of acoustic-consulting service Acoustilog<\/a>. In New York City, he said, \u201cProperty prices are so expensive they figure after they buy it that they are entitled to peace and quiet, and when they can\u2019t get that peace and quiet, it\u2019s frustrating.\u201d 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, \u201cCould it keep someone up? Yes. Could it drive someone crazy? Yeah, it could drive someone crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 so the situation wasn\u2019t just about him. His LinkedIn profile shows he works as a partner at Global Infrastructure Partners, a division of BlackRock (the world\u2019s 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\u2019s largest natural gas projects. In sum, he has a lot on his plate. It\u2019s hard to imagine he\u2019d expend so much energy addressing a mild annoyance.<\/p>\n In September 2020, the park objected to the court\u2019s bathroom closure, filing a motion that said it \u201cdeprives the public of a crucial sanitary facility in a heavily trafficked and vital public open space during a pandemic.\u201d 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\u00a09 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.<\/p>\n \n View of the Pierhouse complex from Squibb Park Bridge. A week later, the DEP inspectors arrived at Samaha\u2019s 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\u2019s conclusion? \u201cThere was no unreasonable noise noted or detected at the time of inspection.\u201d SoundSense, meanwhile, reported that the decibel levels \u201cconstituted violations of the NYC Noise Code.\u201d<\/p>\n How could the two inspection teams arrive at opposite conclusions? I sent both reports to Fierstein. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s noise inspectors had fudged the results and then orchestrated a cover-up. The DEP, meanwhile, asked the court for a protective order against Samaha\u2019s legal team to stop its \u201cpattern of abusive discovery tactics against the DEP,\u201d claiming that it was subjecting city inspectors to unnecessary legal depositions \u201cmerely for the plaintiffs\u2019 ongoing fishing expedition.\u201d The BBPC requested access to Samaha\u2019s duplex for an inspection by its own acoustical expert.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s demands to find the DEP in contempt of court and also declined to grant BBPC\u2019s acoustical expert access to Samaha\u2019s duplex. And then, just when it seemed things couldn\u2019t get more contentious, both parties abruptly canceled the scheduled trial. They wanted to settle.<\/p>\n January 2024 looked like the beginning of the end. That\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The bathrooms were closed again and the job \u2014 which included installing a new bathroom ceiling and a new sound-isolation wall between the bathroom and the lower level of Samaha\u2019s duplex \u2014 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\u2019s contractor refused to install the padding, stating that the toilet manufacturer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cIt\u2019s not a big job,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t know if it would work at all.\u201d<\/p>\n But both sides dug in their heels. In a series of letters exchanged over the next 18 months, Samaha\u2019s lawyer argued that \u201cBBPC was never genuinely interested in finding a workable fix, but rather was focused on avoiding its obligations altogether,\u201d while the BBPC\u2019s attorney said Samaha\u2019s insistence on the waffle pads was \u201ca ploy to prevent BBPC from finishing the work and reopening the public restrooms.\u201d Another impasse.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t granted access to its expert for sound testing.<\/p>\n And so the bathrooms have been barricaded ever since. While there are five other restrooms in Brooklyn Bridge Park, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0September \u2014 just in time for the end of summer.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few weeks ago, on my usual walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park, I took a detour to the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1001360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,197809,400916,150558,9297,400918,5418,405,403,5226,5225,22877,5228,5227,400917,355459,220694,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1001359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-audio-article","tag-bathroom-drama","tag-brooklyn-bridge-park","tag-cityscape","tag-luxury-condo","tag-luxury-real-estate","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-noise","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-pierhouse","tag-public-bathroom","tag-street-fights","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117096777839135036","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1001360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/d86f1a903d2caf2f2677a67d5c027ed2a6-Elevated-view-c.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Anne Kadet\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/a11446bd61eafbff9dfb9df10c30c70a6d-70393545.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Corcoran\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c2b83dc8b08ef596524b8f691ceccfcf23-Public-urination-photos.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Kings County Clerk\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/f574f5f6d01d1fe73b6c4fb1276ab83ba3-Pierhouse-bridge-view.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Anne Kadet\n <\/p>\n