How a Queens family finally slept through the 7 train
Three generations, one bedroom window 40 feet from the elevated track, and a pillow that was engineered on Roosevelt Avenue by people who live there too.
The Alcantara family has lived in the same apartment on 61st Street in Woodside since 1994. It has three bedrooms, a kitchen that gets the morning sun, and a back bedroom whose window is exactly 40 feet from the elevated track of the 7 train. The train passes that window roughly 400 times a day. For 32 years, nobody in the family slept through it.
"You don't sleep through the 7," said Rosa Alcantara, 68, who raised two children in the apartment and now helps raise two grandchildren in it. "You sleep between the 7. There is a difference."
Last spring the family started sleeping through it. This is the story of how, and it involves a pillow, a laboratory in Long Island City, and a sound engineer who grew up two stops away.
The problem with the 7
The 7 is not the loudest train in New York. The Bugle's own tests, published in 2024, put it fourth. But it is elevated, it runs all night, and in Woodside it runs at bedroom height, which means the sound arrives at the pillow directly, through the glass, without the courtesy of a wall in the way.
Hudson Mattress Co. measured it. The company's sound engineer, Priya Raman, grew up on 52nd Street and spent six weeks last year with a microphone in the Alcantaras' back bedroom. The peak, as a Manhattan-bound express passed at 1:15 a.m., was 74 decibels at the pillow. "That is a vacuum cleaner," Raman said. "Every six minutes. On your face."
“You don't sleep through the 7. You sleep between the 7. There is a difference.”
Rosa Alcantara
What a pillow can do
Raman's team had already been working on a pillow for people who live next to loud things, which in New York is most people. The idea was not to block the sound, which a pillow cannot do, but to change its shape. The QuietLoft pillow has a core of layered foam cut at angles that scatter the low rumble of a train, and a softer outer layer that absorbs the high clatter of wheels on rail joints. The result is not silence. It is, in Raman's words, "a train that sounds like it is two blocks away instead of in the bed."
The Alcantaras were the first family to test it. Rosa was sceptical. "A pillow," she said. "I have had pillows. The train does not care about pillows."
She slept until 6:40 a.m. on the first night. It was, she said, the first time since 1994 that she had woken up because of the sun.
Three generations, one window
The back bedroom now belongs to Rosa's grandson, Mateo, who is 9 and who, his grandmother says, "sleeps like a rock anyway, but a quieter rock." Rosa and her husband, Luis, have QuietLoft pillows in the front bedroom, which faces the street and the bus. Their daughter, Ana, took one to her own apartment in Astoria, which faces the N.
"My whole family sleeps on the same pillow now," Ana said. "That sounds strange. It is not strange. It is the first thing we have agreed on in years."
What is in the box
The QuietLoft pillow is made in Long Island City, four stops from the Alcantaras' window, and ships in a box that fits through a mail slot. It comes in two heights, and the company replaces it free for a year if you can hear your train through it. Here is what the Alcantaras told us they noticed:
- The low rumble of the train is softened most; it is the part the angled foam is built for.
- The clatter at the rail joints is still there, but further away.
- The pillow is cooler than their old ones, which Rosa said she "did not expect and will not give back."
- It takes about three nights to stop noticing the quiet, which is its own strange feeling.
The train is still there
Nothing about the 7 has changed. It still passes the window 400 times a day. On the morning the Bugle visited, a Manhattan-bound train had been stuck at Queensboro Plaza for 47 minutes because of a web across the switch, and the Alcantaras had slept through the whole thing, including the announcements.
"I read about it in your paper," Rosa said. "I thought, that is terrible for those people. Then I thought, I did not hear a thing."
Hudson Mattress Co. sells the QuietLoft pillow at its showrooms in Astoria, Park Slope and Harlem, and online with free delivery in all five boroughs. If you live by the 7, the N, the J, the bus, a firehouse or a neighbour with a trombone, you can read more below.
About Hudson Mattress Co.
Hudson Mattress Co. makes mattresses and pillows in Long Island City for people who live next to things that are loud.
Showrooms in Astoria, Park Slope and Harlem. Free delivery in all five boroughs, stairs included.