NYC NOW - November 20, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

New York City’s public housing authority will get $95 million to help tenants who are behind on their rent. Plus, longtime state Sen. Kevin Parker is being sued for rape under the Adult Survivors Act. Also, WNYC's Steven Nessen visits the site where a landslide of debris from a property in Westchester disrupted service on the Metro North's Hudson line. And finally, WNYC’s David Furst talks with Melissa McCart, editor at Eater New York, for some last-minute planning advice for New Yorkers looking to dine out on Thanksgiving Day.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City's public housing authority will get $95 million to help tenants who are behind on their rent. The money comes after city and state lawmakers argued that working class NYCHA residents were unfairly shut out of emergency rental assistance during the pandemic. Governor Kathy Hokel took credit for helping to secure the funding at an event Monday on the lower east side. We're going to support the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who are hard hit by the pandemic and never got the support they needed. We need you to have meaningful rental assistance to help with your back rent. According to city officials, 73,000 NYCHA households owe more than half a billion dollars in back rent.

A Brooklyn woman is accusing a longtime state senator of sexual assault. That's according to a lawsuit filed last week. The woman claims Senator Kevin Parker of Flatbush raped her in her. her apartment in 2004. At the time, the woman says she and the senator were coordinating assistance for flood victims in Haiti. Parker did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The lawsuit was filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window for abuse claims previously barred by the statute of limitations. So far, more than 2,600 lawsuits have been filed under the law. The look-back period expires this Thursday.

Parker voted in favor of the bill when the Senate passed it last year. Stick around. There's more after the break. Last month, a landslide of debris from a property in Westchester disrupted service on the Metro North's Hudson line. WMYC's Stephen Nesson visited the site. A multi-million dollar home overlooking the Hudson River in Briarcliffe Manor has a manicured lawn, a swimming pool, and a hillside of concrete rubble. It looks like a comet hit it. It was one of those things you really had to see to believe. That's Metro North President Kathy Rinaldi. She's watching a yellow digger. sort debris. Last month's mudslide sent heaps of concrete, dirt, and several large trees cascading down, burying three of the four Metro-North tracks below. I think that when you see something like this, it really brings home how vulnerable our infrastructure is and how important the investments are to be made.

Investments in securing the 74-mile-long Metro-North Hudson line from more intense and frequent storms due to man-made climate change. The problems along this particular stretch are twofold. There's increased risk of flooding on one side, and about 350 retaining walls holding back soil, trees, and rocks on steep slopes on the other side. Those are threatened by more frequent and heavy rain showers. You might want to step sideways. Clambering down to the tracks, nearly a dozen workers are on site. Several feet of rail are still buried in dirt or were ripped out entirely. Doesn't look like much of track at this point, right? I told that wasn't track on point. It's used to be

tracked, not tracked. But it's not just train tracks that were damaged. Precious time was lost for other projects. There's like a secondary impact because there was other work that these forces could be doing. It gets impacted by this. That's the MTA's Vice President of Engineering at Metro North,

Mike Loney. He's supposed to be finishing a sandy resiliency project here to raise power cables above ground, so they're not damaged by flooding. But 200 feet of the new above ground cables were destroyed in the mudslide. Now we're doing ties and rail and surfacing and everything else here.

That was not really part of the program work. Loney says the cable project was supposed to be completed this year. It's now delayed months. It is a beautiful place on Earth. What makes the Metro North Hudson line so beautiful, the trees, the river, is also what makes it so vulnerable. Cruise expect the rail will be fixed by the end of the month. The hill work is ongoing.

That's WNYC's Stephen Nesson. The holiday season is here with Thanksgiving coming up this Thursday. If you're not traveling out of town or planning on a big home-cooked meal, it's not too late to consider dining out in New York City this year. For some last-minute planning advice, WNYC's David First talked with Melissa McCart, editor of Eater, New York. There's one obvious advantage to dining out on Thanksgiving. Nothing to clean up.

Oh my gosh. That is worth quite a lot. So especially if you have a small apartment and you have a lot of people to take care of, it is worth having somebody else make it for you. Are there still places you can book? Absolutely. I think the only places you wouldn't necessarily be able to book are the small neighborhood restaurants that have really been flogging Thanksgiving dinner on their Instagrams.

But a lot of the larger restaurants, especially those that might be in Midtown, for example, might have seats as well as those that are connected to hotels. Okay, where would you recommend? I'm kind of considering this one for myself, to be honest. There is a restaurant in Midtown called Fresco by Scoto. It is family run by the Scoto family, and that's Elena and Rosanna, who's on Fox 5 and their mother Marion. It's going to have an Italian slant,

but one of the things that I love about going to this restaurant is, like when the mayor comes in, they'll play a song, and Barry Manil came in, and they played a Barry Manil song, and the whole restaurant got up and started dancing. And so what I think is kind of fun about it is that it's not shuffie. It's interactive in some way. And it feels like a family because you have the family at the door. So that's fun. I think something like Bad Roman could also be fun because it's sort of this maximalist crazy dining

room and has a really fun vibe. And where is Bad Roman located? It is on the third floor of 10 Columbus Circle. So you have a view of the park and you'll overlook the city. La Rock also has Thanksgiving and that's going to be a pricey Thanksgiving. But I think Rockefeller Center might be sort of a lot of that Thanksgiving dinner and you're walking out to the tree of Rockefeller Center. So it will definitely have a holiday vibe.

Are these places that are essentially recreating what we'd imagine as the traditional Thanksgiving dinner? Absolutely. They might really go over the top and have like a selection of breads and a selection of salads and really lush, you know, vegetables and maybe they have like a carving station or something like that. They'll probably have more of everything. All right. So what if we want to go out on Thanksgiving but want food that has nothing to do with the holiday? Where can we go for some counter-programming? Okay. My colleague, critic Robert Sitsima, does this every year. He alternates between going to a Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant. And this year, he's going to Auntie Gwens on 14th Street for a Chinese spread.

A lot of restaurants just are open and ignore Thanksgiving. And you can get their regular menu. And that's perfectly delightful to. And I'm kind of jealous of him. Of course, Robert Seitzima is our guest here on Weekend Edition quite often. Is there a story behind this tradition? He hates turkey. He doesn't like him to Faye, no napping for him. That's Melissa McCart, editor of Eder, New York, talking with WNYC's David First.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Junae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.