‘New York weirdness’: why did a mysterious bell ring in a subway station for weeks?

For nearly two weeks, an alarm rang loudly and continuously inside a New York subway station.

As the New York Post first reported, the “mysterious bell” knelled through the stairway to a downtown 1 train platform at 50th Street in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks north of Times Square. Neither commuters nor workers at businesses located inside the station could identify the source of the incessant ringing.

‘It’s really odd,” Adrien Gallo, who owns three storefronts in the subway entrance, told the Post.

The grating screech resembled the sound that comes when someone opens an emergency exit door. It could be heard on the stairs descending into the subway platform, but didn’t reach the subway platform. Anyone waiting for a train or walking past the subway entrance above ground would not have noticed it.

On Monday morning, straphangers appeared unfazed by the alarm. “I didn’t clock it,” one commuter said. “There’s noise everywhere – it’s just one of those things in New York.”

“There’s so much ringing all over the city that I never notice any of it,” another woman added. “It’s part of life.”

“I just chalked it all up to New York weirdness,” said Wyatt, a worker on shift at Tiny Dancer, a coffee shop located next to the staircase, who did not give his last name. “I thought maybe it’s something on the train, maybe it’s something nearby.”

According to Wyatt, an employee from the MTA, which manages the subways and subway stops in New York, stopped in the coffee shop on Monday with encouraging news. They had discovered where the sound was coming from: a vacant Duane Reade drugstore next door.

Mystery solved, right? Not exactly – the alarm was still ringing. Renee Price, deputy communications director for the MTA, said the transit agency could not turn it off. “The alarm is not coming from the MTA. It is coming from a vacant storefront,” Price wrote in an email. “Please contact the New York City department of buildings or the property owner/landlord for assistance.”

A department of buildings spokesperson noted that the MTA “manages the enforcement of subway stations and other transit property in their jurisdiction”, and would not comment further.

Relief came a few hours later, when a representative for Duane Reade said that the alarm finally had been turned off.

How could an alarm ring for so long in the middle of New York? Many considered it part of the cacophony of sounds New Yorkers hear every day. In a city that shrieks with sirens, car horns, music and other commotion, who’s really going to notice one more layer?

“I just equated it to this phantom noise, and maybe we’re all in a mass hysteria moment: we hear the bell, but we ignore it because we’re New Yorkers,” Wyatt said.

Noise may be omnipresent, but it’s still hazardous. The World Health Organization categorizes noise as the second-largest environmental cause of health problems, after air pollution.

“The most well-known health impact of noise is hearing loss that results from high levels of noise over time, but exposure to noise also stresses other systems in the body,” said Richard Neitzel, an environmental health studies professor at the University of Michigan. “It has been linked to heart attacks, strokes and high blood pressure, as well as mental health and cognitive problems, sleep disturbances and other impacts.”

City environments are inherently noisy, so it makes sense that New Yorkers tune out certain sounds. That doesn’t make it any better. “Even when we do that, our nervous system still responds to the sound and our body is still stressed,” Neitzel said.

And, even though the alarm has been turned off, New York remains a stressful city.