NYC NOW - December 21, 2023 : Midday News

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Mayor Eric Adams says his administration is weighing all options to push back on two policing bills that just passed in the City Council, including a ban of most forms of solitary confinement in city jails and a requirement for the NYPD to report some low level stops. Also, 2023 was a tough year on many fronts so WNYC's Precious Fondren spoke with eight mental health professionals to find out what New Yorkers worried about the most. And lastly, for 35 years The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side has had a strict approach to recreate the apartments of real people who actually lived in the museum's tenement buildings, but our own Ryan Kailath reports, that's about to change.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Thursday, December 21st. Here's the midday news from Lance Lucky. Mayor Eric Adams says his administration is weighing all options to push back on two policing bills that just passed in the city council with veto-proof majorities. One outlaws most forms of solitary confinement in city jails. The other requires the NYPD to report some low-level stop.

where the person is legally free to leave. Mayor Adams told New York one yesterday the how many stops proposal he's long opposed is counterproductive. The city council grilled the NYPD back in March over skyrocketing overtime pay. Proponents of the law say it will hold police accountable for unlawful stops and searches. 2023 was a tough year on many fronts, so what did New Yorkers worry about the most? WNYC's precious fondron spoke with eight mental health professionals to find out, and they share some advice. New Yorkers had plenty of reasons to feel anxious in 2023.

Job losses, climate change, and housing insecurity were among the biggest stressors, according to experts I interviewed. But as we look ahead to 2024, there are ways to ease anxiety in an uncertain world. Stephanie West is a therapist based in Brooklyn. She says one strategy is to think of your future self. How will future me wish I had responded to my mother's kind of critical comment? Putting it in that framework can be very helpful for people in all kinds of situations where, again, they realize that they have more choices than they thought. You can read about more strategies to deal with stress at our news website, gothamus.com.

I'm Michael Hill. For 35 years, the Lower East Side's Tenement Museum has had a strict approach. It recreates the apartments of real people who actually lived in the museum's tenement buildings on Orchard Street. But as WNIC's Ryan Kyloth reports, that's about to change. In 1989, the founder of the Tenement Museum, Ruth Abram, came on WNYC to explain her new project. We viewed the tenement as a kind of changing stage set. one day you may come in and there you'll meet in period apartments set at different times. Any one of the six households we're now researching, that's from 18-15-a-

A few weeks later, Bronx resident Jean Emanuel, a black woman, wrote Ruth Abram a letter saying, my family lived in tenements. They've been here since the 1700s. Please don't forget them. She wrote, quote, most of society seems to write us off. But my people were part of New York City long before it was. a city. They did laundry, swept chimneys, laid bricks, tarred roofs, and did serve in the army in all the wars and deserve to be remembered. I think Gina Manuel's letter is so important

because she so beautifully tells black history in a paragraph. Annie Pollard is the current president of the museum. Gina Manuel is no longer alive, but Pollan says her letter inspired the museum to break its policy of only featuring lives lived in its actual buildings. For so long, that methodology was so sacred and no one ever questioned it. And the most important part of the methodology anyways is telling a story of a real person. And this is the story of a real person. The museum's newest exhibit is the story of a black family just after the Civil War, Joseph and Rachel Moore, who lived in a tenement building that no longer exists in present-day Soho.

Actually, the Soho Grand Hotel is right where Joseph, that a lot of land that Joseph and Rachel Moore would have lived on. Marquis Taylor is one of the Ph.D. candidates who researched the exhibit. It recreates the apartment the Moors shared with a sister-in-law and a white Irish woman named Rose Brown and her half-black son. It challenges a lot of what people think about New York City during the time, and particularly African-American and Irish relationships. In a stunning twist, the researchers learned that Gina Manuel's ancestors lived at the same address as the Moors, at the same time in 1870. The exhibit titled A Union of Hope opens the day after Christmas. Ryan Kyloth, WNYC News. Thanks for listening.

This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.