The city is taking action to quell the fears of a number of residents who were worried that the new half-built, Parking Authority-operated garage at 916 Garden St. would be a noisy eyesore. In a private Monday night meeting at City Hall, a working group including city officials, a Hoboken Parking Authority commissioner, the city planner, an engineer and concerned residents agreed that before the garage opens for business, a test would be performed to determine if it operates as quietly as engineers promised. Officials said that the sound test would likely take place in approximately three weeks, and that if all went well, the garage would open for business in approximately two months. The group also agreed that the architect who has been working on the project would post an illustration in the city’s zoning board offices depicting the way the back of the facility will look when work is completed. Residents who live behind the project say that the 56-foot gray cinder block wall they now face looks like a jail wall. They were worried that builders would not follow through on plans to beautify the back and sides of the project when they took down the scaffolding that had been used to erect the facility’s walls. But after Monday night’s meeting, residents were hopeful that when the project is completed, it would look like what they had hoped for, and be as quiet as they had expected. “I am cautiously optimistic that this will work out and we will be able to put all this behind us,” said Michael Baldassari, who has spearheaded an effort to bring the public’s concerns to the attention of city officials. Three years ago, when the Parking Authority originally proposed to build the first fully-automated garage in the United States right behind his property, Baldassari said that he was thrilled. “I thought it was going to be really cool,” he said. “I even went out and bought a photo album so that I could take pictures and show people how they went about building it.” But since then, Baldassari and a number of other residents have become increasingly unhappy about a garage that they say was not built according to plans. In particular, residents have complained that the facility is larger than it was supposed to be, that windows that were supposed to make the garage blend in with the brownstone-filled neighborhood were not constructed, and that the facility was not built with walls thick enough to muzzle noise. After weeks of lodging complaints at Parking Authority, Zoning Board and City Council meetings, residents finally began to get what they wanted when City Councilwoman Theresa Castellano, who chairs the City Council’s Parking Committee, agreed to convene a meeting of residents and relevant officials and engineers. “We had a very productive meeting,” Castellano said on Wednesday. “The city wants to do anything possible to make this a livable situation. Right now, we are taking this one step at one time and we are getting everybody through the fears that they might have.” To ensure that the garage is operating at a low hum, residents and engineers will test run the facility and measure the amount of decibels the facility’s machinery generates. According to manufacturers, the garage should not generate more than 40 decibels of noise – the equivalent of a soft conversation. Measurements will be taken at the edge of the facility’s property, approximately 20 feet from the windows of residents who live directly behind it on Park Avenue. “Forty decibels may not sound like much, but you have to remember that there is a real difference between listening to the Beatles at 40 decibels and listening to machinery,” said Baldassari. Castellano also explained that the Parking Authority still intended to go ahead with plans to make the garage blend in with the brownstones it stands between as much as possible. Instead of using the original scaffolding, city officials say that the contractor will use hanging scaffolding to install the windows and paint the bricks different colors. “I think this is moving in the right direction,” Baldassari said. “It’s just a shame that a project like this has to come down to us having to complain about everything to get them to do what they said they were going to do in the first place.”
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