NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: AG James Faces Court, PATH Drill, and the Mayor’s Final Push on the BQE

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Attorney General Letitia James heads to court in Virginia this morning to face charges brought by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Port Authority plans a weekend emergency drill at the Harrison PATH station. Also, the FDNY is using artificial intelligence to spot brush fires faster. Plus, in this week’s transit segment, Mayor Eric Adams races to approve a Brooklyn Queens Expressway overhaul before leaving office.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City. From WNYC, it's Friday, October 24th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill. New York State's top law enforcement official is due in court this morning in Virginia. Attorney General, Leticia James, will formally have the charges in her indictment revealed to her and her defense lawyers. Trump administration prosecutors accused James of falsely claiming that she intended, to live in a home in Virginia, which got her a lower interest rate on a mortgage. James claims this is all a revenge plot by the Trump administration because she's used her

state office to challenge the president's agenda in court throughout both his administrations. James also successfully won a civil fraud case against the president in 2023. Heads up, if you use the Harrison Path station over the weekend, Port Authority officials say they're conducting a drill there tomorrow morning. Definitely when I sees Elizabeth Shway has more. From 5 to 10 tomorrow morning, commuters may notice smoke and emergency vehicles around the PATH Harrison Station in New Jersey.

But don't worry, it's for practice. The Port Authority Police Department and local emergency response organizations will be training together for a regularly scheduled exercise. This will happen at the same time as a planned service outage at the Harrison Station because of track reconstruction work between the Harrison and Journal Square stations. Trains will be suspended between those stations until early Monday morning. There will be wheelchair-accessible shuttle buses instead,

and between Newark-Pen Station and Journal Square. The FDNY is using artificial intelligence to help spot brush fires faster before they spread. The department has installed solar-powered detection cameras in several city parks, including Van Cortland Park in the Bronx, High Bridge Park in Manhattan and Marine Park Golf Course in Brooklyn. FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker says the new tools will help them spot trouble and spot it early. These cameras serve as an early warning system capable of identifying smoke or flame activity in real time, even in remote and high-risk areas. The cameras streamed live footage to the FDNY's Operation Center.

Officials say sites were chosen based on repeated fire incidents, high foot traffic, and dense vegetation. It's part of a broader effort to reduce brush fires after a record surge last year. 49 and clear right now, sunny and 59 today. It's Friday. That means it's time for a weekly segment of On the Way. Covering all things transportation, that's after the break. NYC. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's time for All in the Way.

Our weekly segment on all things considered breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us is WNYC's transportation reporter Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Caliphane and editor Clayton Gousa. All right, Mayor Eric Adams doesn't really have much time left in office, right? A little more than two months at this point, Stephen you reported this week that he's trying to ram through approval for a big, potentially controversial replacement to a crumbling part of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway before he leaves City Hall. What's the latest on that? Well, at this point in the game, listeners should be familiar with the term. triple cantilever. Should they?

Is that a term people know? Okay. It's the odd ball section of the BQE. It runs through Brooklyn Heights. It has three levels. Sound familiar? It was built like 70 years ago, and it's on its last legs.

We know there are holes in it. I've literally seen them with my own eyes. The steel is corroding inside of the concrete. And the city has done some short-term measures to buy a few more decades until they figure out how to replace it. And about two years ago, Adams rolled out some designs for a potential replacement.

His transportation department had some workshops, did these presentations, and he debuted three designs to the public, which got a pretty lukewarm response, and then we didn't really hear anything until last week. We learned that Adam sent a letter to the Trump administration, their Transportation Department, Secretary Sean Duffy, asking him to move forward with his designs. We also learned that the city submitted 14 options for federal review. That's way more than the public has ever seen or heard about. Interesting. Let me just say, local leaders are apoplectic. Here's city council member, Lincoln We were blindsided by the Adams administration just a week or so ago, telling us that they were

trying to sneak through a plan for the BQE, you know, just before their term concludes. Wrestler and others are afraid that Adams administration is trying to tie the hands of the next mayor with this process getting underway now. So why is this trouble? Why is it so controversial? We can just zoom out to an episode maybe about seven years ago, right? 2018 going into 19 when under then Mayor de Blasio, the DOT came out with this plan to replace that triple cannon lever structure, right? And in doing so, build a temporary highway on the Brooklyn Heights promenade's beloved view, especially for the people in that neighborhood.

And they lost their minds. They were losing their promenade. They didn't want to also just close down that stretch of the roadway and have traffic diverted into their neighborhood. And it's Brooklyn Heights. I mean, it's pretty wealthy. They're politically connected. Yeah.

There was this big town hall that Adams, who was then borough president, spoke at. It was the same, you know, church where Abraham Lincoln once spoke in the neighborhood. So there was a lot of symbolism there. History, yeah. City backs off. They go back to the drawing board. They do some short-term solutions. They reduce a lane in each directions, do some patchwork fill-ins, put in motions, weight-and-motion sensors, as they're called, to automatically ticket, overweight trucks.

And it bought them more time. But at the end of the day, this can't go on forever. The steel rebar inside of this converse. is corroded. It needs to be replaced at some point or else it's going to be a big, big problem for the city. And that's why Adams is arguing they need to move forward quickly now, but critics just say he's trying to have something to show for his legacy as he heads out of office. Yeah. All right, moving on to some very somber news from another one of the city's biggest construction projects, the worker fell to his death at a job site for the gateway tunnels to or on Manhattan's west side.

Ramsey, what do we know so far? Well, the exact details of how this construction worker fell to their death is still unclear at this point. But the FDNY says that the men fell approximately 50 feet into a deep hole. So for some context, this site is where the Gateway Development Commission is excavating the future entrances for a brand new pair of Hudson River tunnels. So if you walk by Hudson Yards, and I've done this on 11th Avenue, you can really look down and see how very deep this pit is. So fire department officials said that EMS found the man at the bottom of this pit.

They used a Stokes basket, which is a type of stretcher to hoist him back up. and ultimately he died. He still has not been identified, but what we do know is that he was an employee for the New York Concrete Corporation. And all work at the construction site has paused. It's been halted while the responsible agencies investigate the cause of this death. And there's just so much drama with this project. We were here last week, Sean, talking about how Trump is trying to kill it. Because half of it is federally funded. It was a pet project of Senator Schumer, one of Trump's foes, as well as President Joe Biden. And like Ramsey was saying, they're trying to build a new tunnel. the current one was damaged in Sandy. And just like the BQE, this is some ancient New York City infrastructure in need of repairs. And this project is the largest, most expensive, most ambitious public works project in the city right now. This is going to cost $16 billion. I mean, we've reported how it'll take about 12 years to build these new tunnels. The current Hudson River tunnels, the last ones dug out beneath the Hudson to carry trains, were dug out in seven years.

Obviously, a lot's changed since then, including worker safety standards. That's why this is really relevant here. I mean, 110 years ago, you go and dig these tunnels in a compressed air tube. You get the bends. You're not really walking so good after you work in these tunnels. So there's a lot of kind of scrutiny about when a worker death like this comes into play on a big public project like this. And a part of that scrutiny might be from the federal government. I mean, the federal transit administration, they sent a letter to the MTA, different agency in August,

about a worker death from last year, and they threatened federal financial assistance. Now Gateway is a different group, but seeing that it's on Trump's radar, we can imagine how they could use today's incident as another threat to funding. Yeah. All right. From the west side to the east side, the city transportation department is planning to redesign one of Manhattan's most chaotic intersections. It's that one, folks might know it. It's that one in Chinatown down near East Broadway at the foot of the Bowery. Ramsey, why is that intersection so messy anyway?

And what's the plan to fix it? Well, the reason why it's a messy intersection is because seven different streets meet in this one area, called Chatham Square. So if you go there, it feels like a maze. Cyclists go through there, so do drivers. I spoke with pedestrians who said they almost got hit once while crossing. So what this redesign would do is turn it from a four-point intersection, or five-point to a four-point intersection.

It will achieve that by building a brand-new pedestrian plaza. It would widen the southern end of the Bowery, and it will feature trees in Greenery, be a hosting space for Chinatown. Right now, there's a small pedestrian area with a memorial gate. That'll be preserved. and it's a part of a $55 million post-pandemic project to redevelop lower Manhattan. Hopefully, work gets started in 2027. Okay.

Every weekend in our All the Way newsletter, we answer a question from a curious commuter. This one is from MC in Brooklyn, who asks, is the MTA considering expanding this policy of adding a 15-second delay to opening the emergency gate at subway stations? Or are they, hopefully, eliminating it? MTA chair, Jano Lieber, has honed in on subway emergency gates as a way he calls, Well, let's let him describe it. The super highway of fair vision. We're trying to close down the super highway,

become the super highway of fair evasion. The super highway of fair evasion. I've talked about the exit gate is the superhighway of fair evasion. The exit gates, which are the super highway of fair evasion. So people just don't walk through like it's a super highway of fair evasion. I always say it's the superhighway of fair evasion. Wow. Love a super cat.

He always says it. Yeah, clearly. So the MTA really has in recent years spent a lot of money hiring these private security guards to stand near the gates, though those guards can actually make arrests or issue tickets. And they've also, as the MC noted, modified the gates so they unlock after 15 seconds after a rider pushes the handle. It's what the MTA calls delayed egress. And by the end of this year, the MTA expects there to be 150 locations where they do this.

They say it's safe to do it. The MTA believes it's worthwhile because, according to some reporting in April, there's been a 10% reduction in fare evasion at these exit gates. that have the 15 second delay. So they think it's worth it. Yeah, interesting stuff. Thanks to MC for the question. And thanks to WNYC, Stephen Nesson, Ramsey Caliphay, and Clayton Gouza. You can stay in the know on all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter.

That's at gotamist.com slash on the way. My friends, thanks so much. Thank you, Sean. 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 times and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll be back this evening.