Decorative lights flooding downtown Manhattan are getting a dim reception from locals.
Financial District residents say developers adding modern, nightclub-like lighting to building facades are turning lofts in the quiet enclave into discos.
“You shouldn’t take a neighborhood like ours and make it like Times Square,” said Joan Randell, a retiree living on Beekman Street. “It’s a classy neighborhood with old, beautiful buildings.”
Her apartment faces a giant LED screen on the Moxy hotel on Ann Street, a Marriott chain marketed for millennials that opened over the summer. The screen flashes images 24/7 of people partying and shines down Theater Alley and into the windows of lofts on Beekman Street.
Developer Mark Gordon told The Post the screen was designed to resemble the city’s brightest block by employing “Times Square-quality” lighting.
“My apartment is beautiful. I look over City Hall Park, and people who live in this building — it’s almost 140 years old, it’s a landmarked building — and we like a certain style,” Randell said. “We don’t want to be in a disco all night.”
Downtown, with its narrow, colonial-style streets, is “one of the city’s most actively developing neighborhoods,” according to StreetEasy. And developers seem to have an affinity for the flashy displays, residents say.
“Among some of these new developments, there seems to be a tendency to view FiDi or TriBeCa with the same lens as you view Times Square. The perception is they are not residential, but they are,” said Rush Perez, a spokesman for Manhattan Councilwoman Margaret Chin’s office.
“When you have massive billboards and big, bright lights, it can be a huge nuisance,” he said.
A quarter-mile from the Moxy, at 111 and 115 Broadway — the landmarked Trinity and US Realty buildings designed by architect Francis H. Kimball — a blinking, multicolored light show spans the length of their 22 stories.
“The displays on the outside of those buildings are brighter than the spotlights on the top of the Empire State Building,” resident Robert Skula complained at a recent Community Board meeting, according to the eBroadstreet Web site. “Every 30 minutes, they start a three-minute show with pinwheels and flashing strobes.”
Skula said more than 50 tenants at 71 Broadway have filed 311 complaints about the lights since they were installed last July.
Not even the city’s waterways are immune from the visual pollution.
A floating illuminated billboard advertising beer and TV shows has lately been the bane of river-watchers.
“Is nothing sacred?! Now, NYC has a barge with a huge ass LED display?!” Noel Hidalgo tweeted.
And lower Manhattan’s neon nuisance is expected to worsen.
The owners of the Verizon Building, at 375 Pearl St., plan to install a 1,000-square-foot lighted sign atop the tower that will display the logos of its tenants on rotation. Owner Sabey Data Centers agreed with the local community board not to use flashing lights, according to eBroadsheet.
