NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Buying Back Used Needles, A Battle Over a Mountaintop in New Jersey, and a New Exhibit That Transports You to Puerto Rico

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

A new City Health Department pilot program offers New Yorkers a cash incentive to help properly dispose of spent needles. A billionaire family in New Jersey wants to build a housing development on a MOUNTAINTOP in West Orange. And an ongoing exhibit at Manhattan's Poster House Museum takes visitors on a trip to Puerto Rico.

A possible rail strike, a needle buyback program, a fight over a mountaintop housing development, and a museum exhibit that transports you to Puerto Rico. From WNYC, this is NYC now. I'm Sean Carlson. Let's start with the developing story that affects hundreds of thousands of commuters in New Jersey. NJ transit officials and the union representing locomotive engineers and train men are still trying to hammer out a deal ahead of a looming Friday strike deadline. The two sides were reportedly making progress but have yet to reach an agreement.

Last month, the union leadership reached a tentative agreement with transit officials that included pay raises, but an overwhelming majority of union members voted it down and are arguing they're not getting a fair shake. It is a fluid situation, so be sure to check out our website Gothamist for the latest. In New York City neighborhoods with a lot of public drug use, used needles can end up strewn on the ground, creating a hazard for kids and pets. A new city health department pilot program offers New Yorkers a cash incentive to help properly dispose of spent needles. WNYC's Caroline Lewis met up with the nonprofit operating the program outside Echo Park in the Bronx. Josh Delisle is using a small plastic rake to sweep used needles off the counter window of his van and into a big red bucket waiting inside.

Delilah is the co-founder of Addiction Response Resources. That's the nonprofit the city tapped to operate. the buyback program after it launched a similar operation in Boston. It's costing the city $11 million over three years. So some basics, don't recap a use needle, don't break off the tips. That's Ali Hunter, the other co-founder. After a quick training, New Yorkers over 18 can get 20 cents for each needle they turn in, similar to a bottle return program.

There's a limit of 50 per day, which amounts to $10. Zaire Howard, who's staying at a nearby shelter, says he's returned to the van multiple times since the program launched in March. It's a way for people to make money, you know what I mean, and you're cleaning up the streets. So that's a win-win. Participants can bring in their own needles or ones they find on the ground. Echo Park is one of eight hotspots the van visits around the city where injection drug use and used needles are a common site. Sanitation and nonprofit workers collect thousands of syringes from city streets each year,

yet complaints to 311 keep piling up. Used needles can carry HIV or hepatitis, although the city health department says it's very unlikely to catch one of those diseases from an accidental prick with a discarded syringe. But they're still sharp and tend to put parents of young children on edge. Yeah, it is a big problem around here.

Jessica de la Cruz lives near Echo Park and was walking past with her two-year-old. She's like a nature baby. She likes the dirt, she likes trees, She likes to stand and everything. But De La Cruz said she doesn't take her daughter to play here, or to any parks in the Bronx. She makes the trip south to Central Park instead.

After only about an hour outside Echo Park, the buyback crew has filled their bucket to the brim with syringes. Full bucket just from the site, which is about 2,500 syringes. Wow. The crew packed up the van and headed off to the next syringe hotspot. That's W&MIC's Caroline Lewis. There's a battle. unfolding in New Jersey over a proposed housing development on a mountaintop. Well, that story

after the break. A billionaire family in New Jersey wants to build a housing development on a mountaintop in West Orange, but some residents are asking the state to suspend their permit to do that. As WNYC's Mike Hayes reports, the two sides are now locked in an environmental battle. Overflowing stormwater catch basins, water rushing down the mountain in heavy rain, a raw sewage pipe in the wrong place that could contaminate local groundwater, these are some of the claims in a report from an environmental consulting firm that was hired by a group of residents opposed to the project. The company is called Garden Homes, and it's owned by a billionaire family known as the Wilf's. They want to build an apartment complex on a heavily wooded tract of land on the Wachong Mountain Range

in West Orange, New Jersey. The company and the Wilf family declined to comment, but opponents say the company's plan to control flooding from the development contains serious errors and miscalculations, and they've asked the state to suspend Garden Homes' permit. Joe Pinulo is with WeCare, New Jersey, a grassroots organization of residents that paid for the review. The data that were used to support the application were not accurate, so the conclusions drawn by issuing the permit cannot be correct.

Garden Homes has lost a bid to build homes on the site before. 20 years ago, town officials rejected the plan for safety reasons. It's been revived now because Garden Homes has promised to add 100 affordably priced apartments to the development at a time when New Jersey is trying to build thousands of new homes for low and middle income residents over the next 10 years. A spokesperson for the state's Department of Environmental Protection says, the agency is reviewing residence request to suspend the company's permit. That's W&MIC's Mike Hayes. Now to an ongoing exhibit at Manhattan's Poster House Museum,

which takes visitors on a trip to Puerto Rico. The work called Puerto Rico in print, the posters of Lorenzo Homer, has been running for the last month. The easiest thing to say about Omar is that he is, without a doubt, one of the leading printmakers and poster makers of the Americas. That's Alejandro On Reu's, a professor of art history and Latin American stuff. at William Patterson University in New Jersey.

He's also the exhibit's curator. He calls Homer a master of the medium. There is this precision. There's this balance of shape and color. And there's this extraordinary dynamic elegance to all of his pieces. But what does one of Puerto Rico's preeminent poster artists have to do with New York City?

It turns out, everything. He came from a solid middle-class family. His father had a film distribution company. But then the family fell into hard times. So the family ends up emigrating to New York City, right? And New York helped make Omar into an artist. He took classes in live drawing at the Art Students League.

He took classes at Pratt. He was also a gymnast, so that explains a lot, his sense of discipline and rigor. Then, Homer landed a job with the jewelry house, Cartier, in New York. The apprenticeship sharpened his sense of precision and expanded his appreciation of beauty. You were constantly sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a weekly basis to go made drawings of the jewels that you saw in paintings from the Renaissance. and the Baroque period. He took all that experience back to Puerto Rico when he returned in 1950. Omar started making posters for the Commonwealth's graphic arts workshop upon his return.

His famous line is, you know, we could do posters that were artistic and beautiful, but could communicate the ideas that we need to communicate to the people. He put those skills to work making posters dealing with themes from literacy to public health to movie promotions. So he takes an essentially utilitarian way of using primmaking and keeps it utilitarian. but it truly becomes an art form. Lorenzo Homer's mixture of art and utilitarianism will be on display at the Posterhouse Museum through September. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back tomorrow.