NYC NOW - Midday News: State of Emergency After Long Island Wildfires, NJ Hospital Redevelopment Faces Pushback, and NYC Still Feeling COVID’s Long-Term Effects

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

New York is under a state of emergency after wildfires scorched parts of the Pine Barrens region on Long Island over the weekend. Meanwhile, a plan to turn a historic but shuttered hospital in Orange, New Jersey, into apartments is facing opposition. Plus, five years after COVID-19 first shut down New York City, some aspects of life still haven’t returned to normal. WNYC’s Arun Venugopal discusses how the pandemic continues to shape daily routines in unexpected ways.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Monday, March 10. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. New York is under a state of emergency after weekend wildfires burn the Pine Barrens region of Long Island. WNYC's Tiffany Hanson has more. The fires started on Saturday, prompting the closure of Sunrise Highway, a major thoroughfare to the island's east end.

Thanks in part to four National Guard helicopters dropping more than 20,000 gallons of water, the fires are now largely contained. Those helicopters remain on standby, as Governor Hokel warns that strong winds and dry weather will continue through today. State police drone teams are providing live monitoring of the fires, and a burn ban is in place for Long Island, New York City, and parts of the Hudson Valley through March 16th. Orange, New Jersey has plans to turn a historic, shuttered hospital into apartments, and more. But WNIC's Mike Hayes reports the idea has opponents. Orange Memorial Hospital opened in 1906 and was once home to Thomas Edison's lab,

but it closed in 2005 and has fallen into disrepair. Now, the city has approved a developer's $350 million plan to create a gated community with 1,000 apartments. But some locals say the plan is wrong for a city where one in five people live in poverty, according to census data. A coalition of faith-based groups and tenant associations are pushing the developer to add locally owned businesses and affordable housing to the plan. Developer Terence Murray says he's open to community input. 57 and sunny right now. Sunny and 62 for a high, very spring like today. The same tomorrow, then Wednesday and Thursday will say.

see a slight cooling off in the low 50s. Stick around. There's more to come. On WNYC, I'm David First. The New York City area is still grappling with the effects of the COVID pandemic five years after it first shut down the city. While many are back at their jobs five days a week, some things haven't returned to what we once called normal. WNYC's Arun Venetapal joins us to talk about the ways our lives have been permanently altered, sometimes in ways that are maybe not so obvious. So five years later, Arun, how do you make sense of the pandemic? I can't say that I have. You know, 40,000 New Yorkers, David, died from the virus, right? Many of them without their loved ones

by their side. But also, you know, think of all the New Yorkers who just kept going to work because they had to, right? You know, the emergency room physicians, the nurses, the orderlies. A term that suddenly popped into use early in the pandemic was essential workers. What did this mean for the city's labor force? Yeah, I think it was a term that we hadn't necessarily used. It wasn't in wide usage prior to the pandemic. I put this question to Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School. He's also the author of the 2024 book, Tribal, and he called it an ennobling category for a wide variety of hardworking people. It's a unifying frame, a resonant frame that brings together groups like emergency

room physicians and EMTs that we are used to thinking of as glorified heroes with supermarket stockers and food delivery folks from restaurants, you know, who weren't ever before put into that category of frontline workers or workers helping to keep the vulnerable alive. And Morris says he doesn't think the term essential workers has the same power as it did at the height of the pandemic. But one of the legacies of that moment can still be seen with the city's delivery workers. The pandemic prompted them to start organizing and to start demanding better wages, better working conditions. And they have really achieved significant results. There's been a whole raft of city laws.

They recently secured this $17 million settlement from DoorDash. The head of Los Deliveries States Unitos, he told me, you know, he's really proud of what they've achieved and all of that began in the first months of the pandemic. One of the most visible and profound effects of the pandemic was on the city's school system. Five years later, what's the legacy of the pandemic on young New Yorkers? Right. This was the first big city in America to reopen its schools. but it's been a struggle. You know, you have kids who have returned to classrooms at the same time. There are high rates of chronic absenteeism, anxiety, depression.

Teachers say they're dealing with behavioral challenges that they didn't have to deal with prior to the pandemic. Dan Weisberg is the city's deputy school chancellor. And he says, as a city, as a country, we haven't really taken the time to fully process the trauma of the pandemic. and specifically how it affected young people. The kids, even if they were young, they knew that somebody close to them had passed away due to COVID. They knew that their parents were very, very stressed out over a long period of time. Our kids are amazingly resilient, and they have recovered to a great extent. But those impacts on learning, those impacts on social development, we probably won't fully understand them for quite some time.

How has the pandemic affected our mental health? Well, it created a really deep sense of social isolation for a lot of people's sense of loss. Nearly 40% of New Yorkers reported feelings of anxiety and depression in that spring of 2020, according to a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. That figure has since dropped to less than 20%, but for many New Yorkers, the pandemic became a time to take advantage of online therapy. the CEO of a mental health nonprofit called the Jewish Board. His name is Dr. Jeffrey Brenner.

He says prior to the pandemic, all of their work was done in person. And today, three quarters of the therapy visits are done remotely. So a big, huge change there. The jury is still out on, you know, results of in-person versus online therapy. Although there have been studies that have found pretty comparable outcomes, David. What about remote work? Many people found themselves working from home who never expected to. And for some, now, the idea of going back into the office full-time may feel daunting. Yeah, I mean, the city completely emptied out early in the pandemic. But even with congestion pricing that's recently been introduced, you could say the city's really bounced back in a big way. You know, New York now leads the nation in terms of workers who head into their office. That's because of companies like JP Moore. Oregon and Amazon, which require the workers to come back in. I spoke to Anott Lechner. She's a professor at

NYU Stern. And she says she doesn't expect that trend to continue indefinitely. But she says the big question is not whether more workers will return to their office settings, but how corporations will adapt, given the growth of artificial intelligence, AI. You know, she says, in 2020, we did not have chatGBT, for instance. But in 2022, we did. And now all those workers, millions of workers who are working remotely, that work isn't happening face to face, right? It's not happening with like just conversations in a conference room. It's happening over machines, right? And those machines, they're studying and they're learning. And once the machine learns, then we become not as essential, shall I say it mildly. Lecter says,

the implication of this shift is pretty significant in ways that all those millions of people who do prefer a work-from-home lifestyle don't necessarily recognize. So, Arun, you're saying Zoom has seen enough, David, first at this point. I can be replaced. Not in my heart. Okay. Well, Arun, Venigapal, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much, David. And you can read more reporting from Arun and our colleagues, Caroline Lewis, David, and Jessica Gould on how COVID-related trends continue to affect health, education, and the workplace on our news site Gothamist.

Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Check us out for updates every weekday, three times a day for the latest news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcast.