The affected apartments are located on Second Avenue around 95th and 97th Streets on the Upper East Side.
Five buildings have been identified as having facades that are in a fragile state.
Just the thought of leaving her apartment temporarily disturbs Bryana Servedio, but it's a prospect that she and 16 other tenants in streetside apartments face after receiving a letter from the MTA.
"I'm a singer. I have a keyboard. I'm going to have to lug my keyboard to a new place for 30 days. And all my music and stuff like that, I just don't feel like dealing with it," Servedio said.
Bryana's building and five others along Second Avenue, where construction is in full swing on the new subway line, have been identified as fragile by MTA engineers and subject to repair work.
"The facade of the building has started to move away from the building," said Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction.
The expectation is that Bryana and the other tenants will be placed in temporary housing at the MTA's expense for about 30 days while repairs are made.
Construction, which includes blasting, stretches from 97th Street to 63rd Street. Several websites document the blasting, including thelaunchbox.blogspot.com.
The MTA monitors some buildings more closely along the site.
"This is not something of our creation. This is something that deteriorated over time. We got there. We found it. We could not have anticipated it," Horodniceanu said.
Further along the project, engineers say that 87 buildings around 86th street, 87 around 72nd Street, and 24 around 63rd Street are being surveyed. Some may need to be monitored more closely.
"When we leave the area, we leave it in better shape than we found it when we got there," Horodniceanu said.
The MTA says it could be this summer before the residents need to move into temporary housing.
