NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Big Changes Slated for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, AG James Warns of Illegal Discrimination Against Trans Patients, Surf’s Up in New Jersey and NYC’s Night Skies in February

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

New York City’s Planning Commission is considering a rezoning plan that would allow for the building of 4,500 new homes in Brooklyn. Plus, New York Attorney General Letitia James says health care providers that refuse gender-affirming care to trans patients could be in violation of the state's anti-discrimination laws. Also, dozens of teens in Lodi, New Jersey, share a passion for surfing. And finally, WNYC’s David Furst and Rosemary Misdary discuss a parade of planets in New York City’s night skies this month.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jenei P.A. Big changes could be coming to Atlantic Avenue, the historic Brooklyn thoroughfare. The Adams administration says a rezoning plan that the City Planning Commission is considering this week would allow for the building of 4,500 new homes. Officials say it would also bring roughly 2,800 long-term jobs. The rezoning would affect a 21 block stretch of the avenue and surrounding blocks from Prospect Heights to Bedstuy and Crown Heights. The Planning Commission will review it Wednesday before it heads to the City Council for a vote.

New York Attorney General Leticia James is advising health care providers to continue offering gender-affirming care to trans patients. In a letter, she says that refusing care could amount to illegal discrimination under the state's human rights law. The guidance follows an executive order from President Trump, like, last week. He threatened to pull federal funding from organizations that offer gender affirming care to minors, and NYU Langone then reportedly began canceling their appointments. Last week, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from freezing or withholding funds.

Still ahead, we hop over to New Jersey, where some teens there are yelling surfs up. But where? More on that after the break. This is NYC now. Lodi, New Jersey is a landlocked working class town crisscrossed by routes 46 and 80 in the northern part of the garden state. Not exactly the sort of place that makes you think of surfing. But dozens of teens there share an out-of-place passion for wave riding. Here's reporter Brian Donahue with more. If the borough of Lodi has a national reputation, it's probably, unfortunately, because it's home of the bar that stood in for the Bada Bing, where Tony Soprano and his crew hung out.

It's the kind of place where if you stand on Main Street with a surfboard, like I did, you're going to turn some heads. And you can place me to surf around here? No. Hacketacket River. Is it? Nah, I don't know, man. You got to go to Jersey Shore, bud.

Actually, though, you don't really have to. Because there I was on a recent Wednesday night at a surf session of the Lodi High School Surfing Club. In the world's largest indoor surfing wave pool at the dream. Works Water Park at the American Dream Mall, just down Route 17 from Lodi and East Rutherford. Never in a million years, would I ever think I would have touched a surfboard, but here I am. Benita Osmani joined the club when it started three years ago. She's actually graduated, but she came back this night and fairly crushed it, riding across the face of wave after wave till they fizzled out in the shallow end. I love it. It brings so much joy to me.

There are a newbie club members here for their first lesson, too. When you fall like a starfish. Like sophomore Jacob Espiritu. My first time, it was pretty bad. But it was really fun, though, because I like falling. The club holds three wave riding sessions in the pool each year. This was the first for 2025. In between, there's fitness training, fundraisers, and watching surf videos.

All right, out in the water, surfers. We got just about 28 minutes left out there. Just about 28 minutes. Keep on surfing, everybody's killing it. The scene is pretty surreal and maybe unique in all the world. The 2014's riding and wiping out on waist-high crystal blue waves, peeling beneath a cavernous glass ceiling that frames the frigid night sky beyond. Giant sculptures of Shrek and Kung Fu Panda peer down from the rafters,

all just yards from the New Jersey turnpike. But at its core, it's a story we all know about a T-Eympie. with a passion who found a way to pass it on. The wave is artificial, but the stoke is 100% real. That's Lodi High School art teacher Matt Nicolosi, who started the club. The only surf club in Northern New Jersey. He's a long-time surfer who had a side gig, nights and weekends, as an instructor at Scudensurf.

That's the company that runs the surf school here. It's a spiritual thing for me too, and to be able to kind of pass that on or share that with them is amazing. It's like they're part of the tribe now. You know what I mean? matter where they're from, how long they've been surfing. They know what it's like. You know, they're saying only a surfer knows the feeling.

Now they know that feeling. For sophomore Melanie Mejia, that feeling is freedom. I'm very capable of using my arms, not the legs, so I'm able to move a lot using my arms. Just the legs is like a problem. Melanie was left paralyzed at age eight by an autoimmune disease. Tonight, she rolls her wheelchair into the shallows and is the first surfer paddling out to where the waves break. in the deep end.

Being in the waters, I feel so much free, then being in the wheelchair, being trapped inside. Her father, Alexander, an immigrant from Karu, watches from the side as Melanie catches wave after wave, riding on her stomach with a grin bigger than Shrex. Yeah, I love to see her. She's happy. Yeah. So here she goes. She's got a wave.

Yes, to see her face, you know, happy all the guy. As the sessions wrapping up, I'm reminded of an expression amongst surfers. it goes, the best surfer in the water is the one having the most fun. By that standard, the surfers of Lodi High, thanks to one teacher's passion and New Jersey's strange shopping mall surf break just might be New Jersey State champs. That's Brian Donahue, reporting for WMYC. Sunsets will be extra special this month for Stargazers.

All of the planets in the solar system will be on display. at twilight. There's also a star that could go Nova at any moment. My colleague David First talked with WNYC's Rosemary for an update on the February night skies. So for all of the novice astronomers listening, myself included, how rare is it to see all of the planets lined up in a single night? It's not that rare. I know that there's outlets that are reporting it happens every billions of years. It doesn't happen every year, but it's not that rare. they're referring to it as a parade of planets. But that doesn't mean that they're marching across the sky in a straight line like you would see in an elementary school classroom poster of all

of the planets in like a single line. That is not what you're going to see. It just means all the planets are visible and viewable in a single evening. So you can spend an entire evening viewing the planets one by one. Okay, so we're talking seven planets here? Yes. You can see the Earth, if you want, you just look down instead of looking up. Okay, fair enough. Eight planets. And is now the best time to see them early February? This whole month is a perfect time to see these planets. Help me here. Where should I look? First, you're going to want to look west and find the planets in order. That's very important. They set at different times. They're not up all night. And the first one to set is going to be mercury. Within a few minutes of sunset, it's going to be

gone. But make sure the sun has set. before you start staring looking for Mercury? Yes. You're going to want to make sure the sun sets because you don't want to look into the sun. Never, never look into the sun. Okay, once we've either given up on Mercury or found it safely, what's next?

Saturn and then Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and then finally Mars. And, you know, the four brightest of all of these, and they're the ones that you can see with the naked eye are Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Uranus and Mercury, you're going to need the binoculars for that. Neptune will need a telescope. Okay, what else is there to see this month?

Orion, the Hunter, the constellation, is very bright this month. It's one of the most popular constellations to see, and it's also a great constellation to use to locate other objects. But what's most interesting is that on the left upper shoulder, that star located there, is called Beetlejuice. Don't say that three times. But it's a red super giant star that's at the end of its life. And it's supposed to go Nova any moment between now and the next 200 years.

Between now and the next 200 years. In a universe that's infinite and not bound by time, 200 years is an excellent estimate. It's a blink of an eye. Yes. So that's the best estimate I can give you. But that can happen at any moment. This star is huge. It's 700 times the diameter of the sun and 100,000.

times brighter. So you're going to want to catch that. You definitely want to catch that and all of the planets visible in the night skies this month. That's WMYC's Rosemary Mystery, talking with my colleague, David First. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.