Thomas MacMillan Photos
Julita Januszewski has earplugs all around her bed in her Lyon Street apartment, ready to be deployed when the roar of downshifting trucks on I‑91 wakes her up at 4:30 every morning.
Her apartment gets coated with highway soot, and filled with diesel fumes.
Januszewski is one of a number of neighbors on Lyon Street in Wooster Square who have been struggling for years with the effects of living next to an increasingly busy interstate highway. Last week, Wooster Square Alderman Michael Smart amplified those concerns in a public statement at the Board of Aldermen.
Smart introduced a resolution calling on the State Department of Transportation to install an “urgently needed” sound barrier between the southbound lane of I‑91 and the nearby residential neighborhood that’s bracketed by Exit 2 and Exit 3. Such a barrier (pictured) already exists on the opposite side of the highway, next to the Farnam Court housing project. The Board of Aldermen approved the resolution, which is non-binding, by unanimous consent.
Neighbors like Januszewski hope that a noise barrier will help with the triple threat the highway poses to the neighborhood: sound, soot, and smell.
“This has been an issue, I would say, for at least the past two decades,” Smart said. It’s gotten worse in recent years, especially since the installation of the barrier on the other side in 2003.
Smart said he’s lobbying State Sen. Martin Looney to have the project put on the State Bond Commission agenda.
On her way back to her apartment at 14 Lyon St., Januszewski stopped in the street to tell a reporter about noise pollution in her neighborhood.
“At night, it’s sometimes OK,” she said over the rumble of the highway. “But when a truck brakes, it literally wakes you up.”
The noise gets really bad when traffic picks up between 4 and 5 a.m., Januszewski said. That’s when she puts in earplugs so she can sleep until 8. Januszewski, who works from home as a graphic designer, said she makes her own schedule and likes to sleep in.
When she moved to Lyon Street three months ago, she didn’t think the nearby highway would be a problem, Januszewski said. She’d lived for seven years in downtown Chicago, with a hospital around the corner and ambulances going by. It turned out that was nothing compared to the noise of I‑91. “It’s worse than Chicago, by far,” she said.
The air brakes and downshifting of trucks is the worst, said Januszewski. She demonstrated the thundering, monstrous sound they make: “Bbbrroooaaaaggrrhh!”
Another consequence of highway-side life is the stench of diesel fumes that fills her apartment, Januszewski said. “You really smell exhaust,” she said. “It’s really bad.” It’s not a smell that just “wafts through” every now and then, she said. It sits in the air for hours.
Then there’s the highway soot that comes in the windows. In the back room of her apartment, which she has been using as a workspace, Januszewski said she has to wipe down all surfaces at least once a week. A finger swiped across a table top will come up black, she said.
Januszewski said the stink, the noise, and the soot — in that order — have her ready to move out. But she’s stuck until her lease runs out next summer.
Down the street, Januszewski’s neighbor Penny Rogers said she’s hoping for a sound barrier to block highway noise. “You can hear it from here,” she said outside her house at 73 Lyons St. “It becomes this rush or hum in the background.”
Click the play arrow to hear her speak over the highway noise.
That constant noise causes a low level of constant stress, Rogers said. “It’s like negative white noise. You can get used to it, but it’s not good for you,” she said. “If it were a factory, they’d give you earplugs. But it’s where you live, so you have to deal with it.”
The noise has increased since the barrier was put up on the other side of the highway several years ago, Rogers said. “What that does is reflect the sound this way,” she said. “You might as well be on the median strip.”
Like Januszewski, Rogers aired complaints about airborne soot and smells. “If you park your car on the street it’s going to be on it … black, gritty stuff,” she said. “You will see it pile up on window ledges. You can smell it, too.”
Not On The Horizon
Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the State Department of Transportation (DOT) said there are three avenues (“no pun intended”) to building a sound barrier along a highway. None of them look like promising options for Lyons Street.
The first avenue is with federal funding during expansion of a highway, if studies find that a sound barrier is needed.
The second is with state funding through the “Statewide Retrofit Noise Barrier Program.” That’s a much more difficult path to a sound barrier, Nursick said. The program has been completely unfunded since 1989 or 1990 and has 133 requests already on the first-come-first-serve list, Nursick said. Bradley Street, which runs parallel to the highway and perpendicular to Lyon Street, is number eight on the list, Nursick said.
The third avenue, which is “very, very rarely exercised,” is that a community can raise money to pay for a sound barrier itself, Nursick said. This requires extensive study and design work and agreements with the state and almost never happens.
Sound barriers cost about $1 million per mile to install, Nursick said. They help with noise but not with smells and soot. “They really don’t have any impact on air quality,” he said.
The outlook for money for sound barriers on Lyon Street isn’t good. The state is looking at a list of over 100 transportation projects costing $5 billion that are currently without funding, Nusick said. “It’s no secret that funding for transportation projects is uncertain.”
I park my car on that block everyday. I've never had "black, gritty stuff" on my car. And I live closer to the highway than 73. Sure you can hear the highway sometimes. Big deal. The real offender are the j-os that rev their motorcycles and cars down the ONE block of Jefferson until they have to stop at the light. Those are the real noise polluters.
I apologize for the rant.
Sidenote: What's with all the attention to Lyon St.?