CrossFit NYC’s first location was on the fourth floor of a building in the Garment District. The building was old, with rickety construction, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising when, after months of our jumping around and dropping weights and generally pounding the floor, the ceiling fell down onto our downstairs neighbors.

I don’t mean the entire ceiling, and – fortunately – I don’t mean that we actually knocked a hole through our floor and fell down to the level below. Instead, it was just a piece of the ceiling, a six by ten foot chunk of plaster that had shaken loose as much due to age and poor construction as from reverberation.

Still, from our downstairs neighbors’ perspective, we had knocked down their ceiling, and they weren’t thrilled about it. And they made that pretty clear.

Despite the death threats and the law suits, when we eventually moved out it had more to do with running out of space than with them. Still, we certainly weren’t sad to leave them behind.

Because it wasn’t just the ceiling. These guys came up to yell at us several times a day, saying they could hear every step we took across our thickly rubberized floor, saying we made it impossible for them to hold meetings.

Which I always found to be slightly funny. The guys downstairs were a messenger company. And I could never quite imagine what sort of critical meetings they might be holding, in our shithole of a building, all morning and afternoon long.

CrossFit NYC’s latest location is only ten blocks down from that first home, but it’s a world apart. The space is five times as large, clean, with showers and changing rooms, in a much newer, much nicer building. And, this time, when we moved in to the third floor, the second was still unoccupied. Which meant that whoever moved in below us would have a chance to hear whatever noise we might make beforehand, would know exactly what they were getting themselves into.

And, in this economy, with New York’s commercial real estate market collapsing, we reasoned, we might go neighborless for months or years before the space was filled.

Or not. We were in our new digs for less than a month before we discovered that a company had just leased the second floor.

It turns out, they’re a messenger company. And they’ve already visited us a few times about the noise.

Let’s hope their ceilings are screwed in tight.