NYC NOW - June 4, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

A Brooklyn mother is grateful she’s not planning a funeral today after her daughter and niece were shot on a playground Monday night in Brooklyn. Also, Mayor Eric Adams is pushing for more public restrooms in New York City. Plus, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with sports reporter Priya Desai about the International Cricket Council Men’sTwenty20 World Cup. The tournament is in New York for the first time in history. And finally, we’re celebrating Pride Month by sharing the voices of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.

NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City. From WMYC, I'm Jenae Pierre. A Brooklyn mother says she's grateful she's not planning a funeral today after her daughter and niece were shot on a playground Monday night in Brooklyn. Melissa Alexander says her daughter, 9-year-old Rwana Brown, is expected to make a full recovery after she was struck in the knee by gunfire at a park near their home in Brownsville.

Rihanna was released from the hospital and is expected to recover soon, but Alexander says the mental trauma may take longer to heal. She has a little anxiety. She's nervous. She's in and out of sleep, jumping out of her sleep. She's scared. She's scared. The park is her favorite place, but unfortunately it's not anymore. Police say the girls were not the intended targets and that no arrests have been made. Brown's cousin, 11-year-old Empress Alexander Davis, was shot in the back, official said, and is still. being treated. New York has had a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans for more than four decades. Now, environmental groups and redemption centers are pushing for an increase. Here's WMYC's John Campbell. The coalition pushing for what it calls the Bigger Better Bottle Bill is making a last-minute effort at the state capital.

Ryan Castalia is with Sure We Can, a nonprofit redemption center in Brooklyn. He says it's way past time to increase the deposit to 10 cents. For our future, the bottle bill must be expanded. The deposit must go up. And it must happen now. But time is running out for supporters of the measure. The last day of the legislative session is scheduled for Thursday. Public restrooms are in short supply in New York City.

But Mayor Eric Adams hopes to change that. WMYC's Ramsey Caliphay has the details. If you ever had to go while out and about in New York City and struggled to find relief, Mayor Eric Adams knows the feeling. And now he has a plan to build or renovate 82 public bathrooms over the next five years. You should be able to move around the city and deal with some of the basic essentials of being a human being, a parent, and finding the right restroom facility. He's calling the plan, you're in luck.

The city also released a new map of nearly 1,000 public bathrooms around the five boroughs, though many have limited hours. Coming up, I bet you didn't know that the world's most popular sport is not soccer. It's cricket. And some of the best cricket players from around the globe are in town for the Men's World Cup. More on the big tournament after the break. Stay close. The Men's Cricket World Cup is in New York for the first time in history.

The tournament started Saturday in Dallas. and runs through the month of June. WMYC's Sean Carlson talked with sports reporter Priya Desai about the basics of the game. So for those not in the know, what is this tournament? The men's cricket World Cup

International, we call it for short, men's T20. Just call it that. That's the best way to go. And it's a much, I call it like a spicier, faster,

really fun version of cricket. Like traditional, traditional cricket is four to five days. Yeah, the game's going on. forever. Then there's another iteration. That's eight hours. So back in the mid-2000s, they were like, oh, how do we make this an international thing? And so they came up with Team 20. So I'll tell you why it's called T20. So it's 20 overs. And overs are six balls that are thrown to the batter. And they

limit it to 20 to make it faster because back in the day, there was no limit to overs. So that's why it could go on over and over and over and over and days and days. So this just is, I would call it like just a fun, funky version of cricket. Now, there's not a big footprint or as big a footprint for cricket in the U.S. as other parts of the world. So how did we end up posting this thing? Well, there is Major League Cricket. And that came to the United States two years ago. And there's some deep pockets coming in.

You have Chiarukon. He's a huge international star. He's one of the investors. The CEO of Microsoft is one of the investors. And the way countries can play in this World Cup tournament is by one of the. ways is by qualifying. Unfortunately, the United States has not good enough to do that. And so the U.S. hosted it along with West Indies, and they got an automatic bid. They're playing in Long Island, in a temporary stadium that was put up, and tickets are hot. They are expensive. The India,

Pakistan, that's the big get right now. And I know there are going to be a lot of people who disagree with me, but I'm going simply from ticket pricing on the secondary market. We're talking between $2,000 to $20,000 for this match. Wow. In City Field, they're hosting a viewing party. And they gave away $25,000 free tickets. And they went like in a minute. Can we talk more about the stadium where this is happening?

I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that there is a cricket stadium. It's a modular stadium. So it's only going to be up for the nine matches that are in New York. And after that, it gets taken down. But the hope is, as cricket expands all over the United States, that right now there's only six teams in Major League Cricket that hopefully New York specifically can get its own permanent stadium. Talk more about the Major League Cricket League and New York's team. New York has a team? Yes, it's called My New York. They play all their matches currently in Texas, right outside Dallas.

And starting this summer, they're going to start playing in North Carolina. Those are the only two states that have cricket stadiums that can currently play these games. And there's only six teams. So hopefully an expansion is coming soon. That stadium in North Carolina actually is the newest expansion. So it's a slow burn. I like to steal an old baseball line. If you build it, they will come. And that's what they're finally doing.

They're putting in a lot of money into this team. And that's how you really build any new sport, any new league, is by putting in the money. Let's talk about the nitty gritty of this tournament, the 2020. Now, you talked about the India-Bakistan game, right? That's the big one to watch. What are the other ones that we should be? you're looking at for? So the Cricket World Cup, a separate World Cup from this one, that happened last November. And India lost to Australia in India. It was a huge deal. So I think that matchup is

really a fun one to look out for. Other teams that are really great to watch are England, whoever they match up against, they're really fun. They have a lot of power on their team. And if you take a little bit of time just to read up on the teams, maybe you'll find maybe it's not America. Maybe it ends up being Australia. Maybe it ends up being Pakistan that you have of following. But I think it's Americans' chance to really get in on the ground level of a sport that hasn't been very popular here. So for folks who want to watch these games and don't want to pay thousands of bucks to either go to Long Island or City Field to watch it in the Jemotron, where can you watch it? Well, you can go to the World Trade Center. They're showing all the

matches. They did the same thing for the World Cup FIFA. And it's a party. That's sports reporter Priya Desai, talking with WM. NYC's Sean Carlson. It's Pride Month. To mark the moment, WNYC is sharing the voices of LGBTQ Plus New Yorkers. We recently set up shop at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center in Crown Heights to talk with people about what it means to be LGBTQ plus in today's world. My name is Billy Smith. I live in Brooklyn. I'm 26. I am a cis man and I use he-him pronouns. The intersectionality between being queer and black is there's not a lot of spaces for me.

And then the spaces for me that are for me, they don't always want me there or they don't always like me there. You can go to a black space and they don't want queer people. You can go to a queer space and they don't want black people. You can go to a black queer space and they don't want you. So I make my own space. I started out by deciding that I was done being a people pleaser. I stopped saying yes to certain things. I started saying no to certain things.

I started making my dichotomy. I changed my name from William to Billy, and I said, and guess what? That's me now. That is who I am. That's my space. Billy gets to say what he wants and help who he wants and say no when he wants. I've decided that I'm chasing the joys in my life, and it's not focusing on the bad stuff. Life's hard enough.

My sibling is my role model. My mother is my role model. persevering through this world is hard and watching them do it helps me to do it too. If we're going a little bit higher than that, I would say that I've always been obsessed with James Baldwin. He set the pace for quite a lot of us. I see myself as a role model for young people because I exist and existence is enough, right? As soon as I made in my space, there was other people who came to it because they felt seen. You can look up and you can say, look, there is a black queer man who is alive, which that is all you need to do. You can see

that, hey, it might be hard right now, but in a couple years, he's still alive. I will be too. I'm proud of how far I've come. I'm proud of how far I will go. And that's all I need to know. That's Brooklyn resident Billy Smith. 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.