Tales of New York's Worst Neighbors
Because sometimes you need to know you're not alone.
Watching Carrie refuse to take off her heels in her apartment (I shamelessly watch And Just Like That, don't judge me) reminded me of my own New York neighbor nightmare.
Three years ago, my downstairs neighbor knocked on my door and threw cheap slippers at me. "Stop walking around during the day," she demanded. “I can hear your heels.” Meanwhile, we lived in a building where every step was audible because the creaky floors were at least 100 years old. Sometimes, you just need to accept what you signed up for.
She worked overnight shifts and was essentially nocturnal, which meant my completely normal daytime footsteps messed with her sleep schedule. I apologized and promised to be quieter (I already had rugs and wore slippers), but it wasn't enough.
At all hours — 9am, 1pm, 3pm, 7pm, 11pm — she and her partner would bang on the ceiling with not one but two brooms in unison. When that didn't work, they escalated to using a Theragun on the ceiling, literally vibrating our floor. I found myself tiptoeing to the bathroom at all hours, living in fear of another confrontation.
The daily ceiling routine came with regular reminders that she'd never heard her upstairs neighbors before moving into our building. (Reader, she grew up in a doorman building in the Upper West Side.) Sorry, Amy — we both signed leases in an older building. That's New York, baby. I was just as thrilled as they were when they finally moved to New Jersey.
The more I told friends about this crazy story, the more I realized I wasn't alone in neighbor hell.
For this edition of extra credit, I asked some of my friends for their most deranged neighbor stories, and boy, was I entertained. Buckle up, and be grateful for your good neighbors if you have them.
Tales From Neighbor Hell
The Door Breaker
“Our downstairs neighbor terrorized us over noise (me, my husband and our cats). It was just a badly insulated building. It started with texts and bangs up on their ceiling and escalated to them threatening to call the cops (on exactly what, I really am not sure). Then in the pandemic one day at like breakfast time, the neighbor texted me while we were standing still in the kitchen being like, “Will you two learn to shut the fuck up?” and my husband just had it and stomped on the floor. So the neighbor ran upstairs and banged on our door so hard he actually got IN, and WE had to call the cops. We literally tried everything. I woke up every morning at 3 am to feed the cats so they wouldn’t move in the night. We bought like seven rugs to layer on top of each other. Forget ever walking around in shoes in our home. We’ve moved since then, and I still catch myself tip toeing around.”
— Siobhan, Williamsburg
The Party Animal
“My now-wife and I moved into a studio apartment in Astoria in our early 20s. The small space was actually fine — the problem was our nextdoor neighbor, a single guy in his 30s. He would consistently have wall-shaking parties until dawn. And while I can’t prove it definitively, we had plenty of clues over the few years we were there that made us think he was a nocturnal drug dealer. No matter the number of confrontations or pleas with the landlord, nothing could stop him. And to make it worse, he would buy off the building’s doorman, who always pretended to be completely helpless in stopping a situation like a rager at 4:30am on a Monday.”
— Rich, Cobble Hill
The $600 Electric Bill Mystery
“We moved into our apartment and hooked up our meter to Con Ed and set up autopay. Months went by, and I started to question why so much money was coming out of my account. I was being charged for $600 of electricity PER MONTH and I was like, ‘This can’t be. We live in a one-bedroom apartment.’ So I investigated and found out the meters were mislabeled and we were hooked up to our neighbor’s electric instead of ours, and they were running A BLOWUP HOTTUB 24/7 in their tiny backyard. Anyway, we got it sorted out, and we have been close friends ever since.”
— Sophie, West Village
The Aggressive Letter Writer
“I had a neighbor who yelled at me multiple times for slamming the door and said I was too out and about to be a good neighbor. She kept lecturing me, but I consistently saw her in her pajamas at like 12pm, so we were clearly running on different schedules. On New Year’s Eve, she wrote me a letter, asking me to stop slamming the door, calling the loud doors one of the “building’s flaws.” She even gave me step-by-step instructions on how she wanted me to close the door. We had a few stare downs and then she got dramatically kicked out.”
— Sarah, Nolita
The Plant Stealers
“I had neighbors who would climb over the fence, using a ladder, between our yards, and they began stealing my house plants that I had put outside for watering while I was going to be away. I had put the plants out on a table to get water and sun while I was going to be away for three weeks. Not more than five minutes after I put them out, I was packing in my room and saw a couple pointing at the table and looking over the fence. Five minutes later, I saw a ladder come over the fence, which is about five feet high. They proceeded to pick up the plants in the nice pots I put them in and awkwardly climb over the fence. There were probably about 20 of them. Some were in big large pots, too. I watched them for about 30 minutes, and as soon as they got the last pot over, I walked out and told them very directly that I’d appreciate it if they put all the plants back exactly where they were and never enter my yard again. I was quite proud of myself for keeping my cool and being petty enough to have them awkwardly schlep it over and then force them to completely rewind.”
— Andrew, Crown Heights
The Bell Buzzer
“My upstairs neighbor is a nightmare. She regularly locks herself out and then in the middle of the night, she rings everyone’s bells and stands outside their windows screaming ‘You’re not letting me in! You’re not letting me in!’ She also got mad that she couldn’t personally see the boiler that gives her apartment hot water. She said she should be able to ‘See it, touch it, smell it, lick it’ if she wants to.”
— Carmen, Park Slope
The Invisible Critic
“I never ONCE saw my neighbor leave his apartment the last two and a half years I lived there. He ordered in every single meal — usually McDonald’s or Starbucks for breakfast or lunch, a lot of Popeyes for dinner. One time, he accused us of animal abuse. He wrote a note and taped it to our door that said ‘THIS IS ANINAL ABUSE’ because we let our dogs hang out on the balcony with us on a summer night.”
— Jamie, Upper East Side
Plot Twist: When You Are the Problem
“My downstairs neighbors in my first apartment had a new baby, and we were constantly having parties. It was a 4th floor walk up with very creaky floors. We felt so bad after they repeatedly complained that we left a bottle of rosé with a nice note on their doorstep. It was probably a $15 bottle because we were 22 at the time. The woman saw us in the hall and thanked us and was like, ‘By the way, my husband is a wine dealer.’”
— Phoebe, Fort Greene
Do some neighbor research, if you can.
A Tip From an Anonymous New Yorker
“In addition to all the other questions you should ask when you see an apartment, you should consider asking your broker about who your neighbors would be. Otherwise you’d never know when you might end up with your landlord living below you — a woman who irrationally doesn’t like the fact that you’re home all the time during a global pandemic and occasionally even dare to walk around your apartment.”
Thanks for reading Extra Credit. Now go hug your decent neighbors (or just be grateful for them).