Williamsburg Whole Foods neighbors say late-night deliveries are ruining them

Williamsburg’s anticipated Whole Foods, which opened in July, has apparently turned into a nightmare for nearby dwellers. It isn’t the stroller mobs or aggressive return smoothie sippers that are the root of the problem, but delivery trucks rolling up and unloading at the casual hour of 3 a.m. This is so not what they left Manhattan for.

“Three or four nights a week I get woken up at least once in the middle of the night by truck horns honking...they're like the loudest thing I've ever heard,” a North 4th Street resident told DNAinfo, “Once you get woken up it's the forklift beeping, the truest sense of torture. When I die, hell is just hearing forklifts beeping.”

While the increased freight traffic no doubt bugs surrounding neighbors, residents of North 4th Street between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street have a front seat to the early-morning action. A loading dock situated on the residential throughway keeps trucks arriving and unloading all night long.

Residents of the block have been working with Whole Foods to reach an agreement over the hours the store will accept deliveries. But according to the block association, a period of back-and-forth negotiations with the store have failed to see any limitation of delivery hours actualized.

“It still hasn’t stopped. For every hour they're open at night my kids don't sleep. No one sleeps on my block,” block association chief Marc Auerbach told DNAinfo. “I'll do whatever it takes to be a pain in the ass and get them to amend the problem. I'm not going to roll over.”

The city says it will send inspectors to see if the store is violating a noise code. Meanwhile, Whole Foods does sell plenty of natural sleep aids.

• Whole Foods Deliveries Leave Williamsburg Neighbors Sleep Starved, They Say [DNAinfo]
• Surveying Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, now approaching peak post-gentrification [Curbed]
• All Whole Foods coverage [Curbed]