NYC NOW - February 14, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Democratic attorney Landon Dais cruised to victory in a special election Tuesday for a state Assembly seat in the Bronx. Also, the Legal Aid Society is suing Mayor Eric Adams over his refusal to expand housing subsidies for poor New Yorkers. Plus, a new book from sociologist Terry Williams details the lives of people who lived in tunnels underneath New York City. And finally, forget love…baseball is in the air. Pitchers and catchers met up Wednesday for the Yankees and Mets spring training.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jene Pierre. We kick things off in the Bronx, where Attorney Landon Days cruised into victory after Tuesday nights special election for its state assembly seat. Days is a Democrat. He beat Republican nominee and public housing leader Norman McGill. Days will represent parts of the High Bridge, Morris Heights, and Claremont neighborhoods until the end of the year, which is the remaining term for the former assembly member, LaToya Joyner, who abruptly resigned last month.

Days will have to run again in November to serve a full two-year term. The Legal Aid Society is suing Mayor Eric Adams over his refusal to expand housing subsidies for poor New Yorkers. The law was passed by the city council last year and was supposed to go into effect this month, but Adams says the policy is too expensive. Maria Vincent is one of the plaintiffs in the law. lawsuit filed by legal aid. She says her $42,000 a year salary would make her eligible for the housing voucher under the law, but she's currently living in a shelter with her 12-year-old grandson. It's extremely hard on him. It's extremely hard on a lot of our families for children

to be going through this. Well, I ask that for the mayor to implement the law. A spokesperson for the mayor says the bills violate New York law because authority over housing vouchers is reserved to the The city council is also considering whether to sue Adams over his refusal to implement the law. Stay close. There's more after the break. For more than 40 years, sociologists Terry Williams has studied subcultures in New York City, from Black Oystermen on Staten Island to superintendents in Harlem. Now he's out with a new book called Life Underground. Williams spent years getting to know people who lived underground in a once-abandoned train tunnel on the west side of

Manhattan. WMYC's Ryan Kylath has a story. New York and its people have always fascinated Terry Williams, so much so that he's devoted his life to studying them. I come from Mississippi. I was part of a play that we produced. They brought us to New York and performed the play in Little Harlem. And I felt that there was something absolutely extraordinary about what I was seeing, riding in a Greyhound bus, downtown square, coming from a town to 2000, you can imagine what was happening. I saw this incredible place called New York City,

and I fell in love, and I never lost that love still there. So I started to ask the question, who are all these people? Where are they going? And so that became the way in which I wanted to help tell these stories about who these people were and where they were going. Williams, who's now at the New School for Social Research, has published books about New York Street Hustlers

and Illegal After Hours Clubs. He's the joint recipient of a MacArthur grant to study the culture of housing projects. His new book relates research he conducted over decades, starting in the late 80s, when someone told him about people living underneath the city. Grantsenture Terminal was my first interest underground. My graduate students and I were both sitting in the information booth there,

And at around 12 midnight, people started to disappear. And I started to follow people, see where they were going. And they were actually going five levels underneath Grand Central Terminal. At first, Williams was interested in the effects of light deprivation. Then he met Bernard Isaac. In the 90s, Isaac was living in the abandoned train tunnel under Riverside Park, where Amtrak trains now run north to Albany. We're at 95th Street.

We're in the middle of the highway. And this is the grate. If you can look under here, this is where I was called in Bernard. His bunker is right down there. So I would holler here, and he would come and say, okay, well, Terry, come down here, and he would take me underground to his bunker. And that was beginning of the conversation.

Bernard was called the Lord of the Tunnel. He was an extraordinarily brilliant man. Unfortunately, Bernard died in 2017, but I had been following him for 20 years. years. William spoke with more than a hundred people and followed eight closely for his book. He spent the most time with Isaac, who was working then, collecting books and selling them on to the many sidewalk booksellers on the Upper West Side. There's this hierarchy of misery that exists in underground. At the high end of that hierarchy are people who were selling books,

who were actually getting books from supers along Riverside Drive. I think the book selling is really kind of interesting because we see this population is basically disposable. And we also see them as lazy and what might be described as an undeserving poor. But we don't account for people actually working. I always saw this as an example of the working poor. Bernard, of course, represented that. Williams follows others all along this hierarchy, can sellers and plastic bottle sellers, squeegee men who wash windshields at red lights, beggars with regular spots and beggars who roam. He follows residents of the tunnel from when they were first discovered by the media and sensationalized as mole people in a 1993 book by the journalist Jennifer Tooth. Around that time, residents were repeatedly cleared out to make way for Amtrak service.

That was really what I wanted to do. I wanted to just tell the longest story possible. about people, not about what happened to them in the short run, but what happened to them in the long run. A central takeaway from Williams' research? As an ethnographer, you oftentimes, when you're doing this kind of work, you lead the people, and you don't see them again. But if you're doing, if you really are connected to the world that you're writing about, you maintain a relationship with people.

And I think I did that with Bernard until he died, yeah. Mary Williams' new book is called Life Underground, Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York. That's WMYC's Ryan Kaila. Before we go, here's some news that'll warm the hearts of baseball fans in the dead of winter. Pitchers and catchers met up Wednesday for the Yankees and Mets spring training. That means we're about six weeks from Major League Baseball's opening day. There's excitement in Yankee camp this spring, as superstar outwe. Fielder Juan Soto joins the Bronx bombers after a trade with San Diego.

There are questions as to whether the impending free agent will stay or go after this season.