Quiet as the grave

Stunning Harlem slayingsyg of ‘noisy neighbors’

Disabled construction worker Bruce Anderson complained for years about the slightest noise from his upstairs neighbors in their fivestory Harlem apartment building.

“I’ve seen him with a mop stick in the hallway, shouting, ‘If you don’t keep the noise down, I’m going to come up there and whip your ass,’ ” one neighbor told The Post.

On Friday afternoon Anderson, 59, apparently decided he’d had, and heard, enough.

The angriest man at 26 W. 131st Street grabbed a gun no one knew he had. He shot the couple upstairs, Hampton “Smithy” Smith, 78, and wife Yvette Rivera, 62, officials say — and then set his own apartment on fire.

“Come and get me!” he dared arriving cops.

Then he fatally shott him-himself in the head, leavingving behind a scene of ashsh and carnage.

Anderson was a loner who had in-jured his hip some years back and did not appear to work,, neighbors said.

Smith (inset) andnd Rivera lived above himim on the second floor withith a pair of cats, and wereere the sweetest — and quietestest — peopeople in the building, still-shocked neighbors told The Post.

For more than a decade, Anderson hollered at the couple simply because they were “walking back and forth in the apartment,” a neighbor and pal of Smith told The Post, asking not to be named.

“Smithy wouldn’t answer,” they said ofo the times Anderson wouwould bang on the coupleple’s door. Mary Hall, 71, has llived in the building ffor nine years, and now has bullet holes in her wall. “He would say they wwere making noise, bubut they didn’t have notnothing up there to makmake noise with,” Hall said. “CatsC can’t make noise, even big oneso . . . I would say, ‘Smithy, what’s going on?’ and he would say, ‘ He is crazy. He is complaining about noise.’ ” About three years ago, “He heard me talking to another tenant and he thought we were talking about him,” Hall remembered. “He knocked on my door and he said, ‘You got issues with me?’

“I said, ‘Baby, I don’t even f--king know you. I ain’t talking about you, I don’t know you,’ and that was it. ”

Building superintendent Edgar Palacios agreed.

“That grumpy man, he hardly talked to nobody,” he said, except to complain. “He complained about every little thing.”

Palacios thought of Smith as a second father. “And Miss Yvette, you know, she was a sweet little lady,” he said.

The super added that he doesn’t think the couple made much noise, and wondered why Anderson didn’t just move away.

“Walking? Something like that. But they don’t have any kids in here . . . They don’t make any noise,” he said. “You put up with that for 10 years. You don’t look for another apartment?”