April 19, 1998, Sunday, THE CITY WEEKLY DESK, NEW YORKERS & CO.

When Earplugs Fail

IT'S springtime in New York, 4 A.M.

Perched on apartment windowsills, pigeons coo incessantly as they await the dawn. Nighttime revelers joke and laugh, calling loudly for taxis as they stagger in the balmy air. Sanitation trucks belch exhaust as they lumber down the streets, their crew members yelling to one another as they empty used ice cream cups and soda bottles from metal cans, then hurl the cans back to the sidewalk where they clatter and fall just as the next wave of trucks rumble in to empty the behemoth Dumpsters.

It was last springtime in New York, 4 A.M.

Pam Rabb, a psychotherapist who lives on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, could not sleep. In fact, she says, it felt as if she and her husband, David Stokes, a researcher at New York University Medical Center, had not slept in months. Night after night they tried to shut out the noise from trucks pulling up and disgorging their wares at the Grand Union supermarket loading dock six floors below their bedroom window.

The noise was driving them crazy. ''I was beside myself,'' Ms. Rabb said. ''They were slamming metal crates against a metal platform all night, and running the refrigerator trucks for hours.''

Although the city has stringent noise codes, many people complain that enforcement is spotty, despite a recent well-publicized crackdown on a few East Side bars. The Department of Environmental Protection is responsible for enforcing regulations governing commercial and industrial noise but not that from residences or mobile sources like car alarms, said the agency's spokeswoman, Cathy DelliCarpini. Those fall to the Police Department, under the general rubric of disturbing the peace complaints.

The city's Administrative Code bans ''unnecessary noise.'' Most construction work must be carried out only on weekdays from 7 A.M. to 6 P.M., and music from commercial establishments may not exceed 45 decibels as heard in neighboring residences (an amplified rock group can produce 115 decibels).

Ms. Rabb and Dr. Stokes said they called the Sixth Police Precinct and the supermarket, but relief was not forthcoming. In desperation they called Citiquiet on the Upper East Side, one of a handful of companies that say they can help New Yorkers block external noises from their lives.

The city is ''full of pollution, stress and noise,'' said an environmental advocate, Virginia Bell, whose guide to ''green'' living, the Manhattan Health Pages, is to be published in the fall by the Little Bookroom, a small Greenwich Village publisher. People need a safe haven, she said, so it is ''especially important to have peace and quiet at home.''

Citiquiet and its main competitor, Cityproof, in Long Island City, Queens, manufacture and market interior windows designed to block out noise as well as soot and grime.

The windows, which either swing or slide open, are made of heavy glass and are installed in frames that fit inside existing windows. The extra layer of glass and the air between the two windows help to damp noise.

The windows can be built to fit around air-conditioners, and because they are inside, they do not require approval from co-op boards or government agencies like the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Such approvals usually are needed to replace old outside windows with ones that afford more peace and quet.

After measuring the regular windows in the couple's apartment, Citiquiet fitted its interior ones a few inches from the frame of the panes, which were unscathed.

''It's just great,'' Ms. Rabb said. ''It was an enormous relief.''

She said she has not been awakened by the clamor from the streets since her windows were put in a year ago.

Citiquiet's vice president, David Skudin, said the company also builds sound-baffling walls and installs drop ceilings to insulate apartment dwellers from noisy neighbors, whether next door or on the next floor.

Quiet does not come cheap. An average interior window costs $500 to $1,500, but can go considerably higher, depending on the size and complexity of the job, Mr. Skudin said. The president of Cityproof, Michael Damelin, said prices for his company's windows were in the same range.

To many New Yorkers, bothered by noise and a host of other environmental annoyances, no price is too high. They are obsessed with the thought of having some silence and tranquillity where they live.

''To those it bothers, noise is absolutely the worst thing in the world,'' said Richard Peritz, president of Metrosolar, a Long Island company that installs sound-deadening windows that also reduce light, using a film coating, for those overwhelmed by the sun.

Metrosolar's windows are plastic and are attached magnetically to existing window frames. (If existing frames are wood, metal strips are added.) They generally cost less than those from Cityproof or Citiquiet, Mr. Peritz said, but they do not slide, so they have to be removed entirely if outside windows are to be opened. Still, he said, like other interior windows, they do dull the city's roar.

And that seems to be what counts. Lesley Koustaff, a senior editor at Oxford University Press, came to New York last June after living for 15 years outside Tokyo in an atmosphere of what she called ''absolute silence.'' Moving to the fifth floor of an East Side building near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, she said, she spent one sleepless week before calling Cityproof to install windows in her apartment.

''I tried earplugs at first,'' she said, ''but then I decided that was ridiculous.''

For Ms. Koustaff, the windows changed everything. ''They made living in New York bearable for me,'' she said. ''Without them, I would not have been able to stay in the city.''