NYC NOW - October 1, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

The MTA begins construction on a new entrance to Grand Central Madison in Midtown Manhattan which will accommodate people with disabilities. Meanwhile, advocates and parents of kids with disabilities are calling for major improvements to New York City's school bus system. Also, WNYC’s Caroline Lewis looks into empty storefronts that have been shutdown for illegally selling cannabis. And finally, is New York City becoming the capital of Tik Tok? WNYC’s Sean Carlson and Ryan Kailath address the question.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. We begin in Manhattan, where the MTA is starting construction on a new entrance to Grand Central Madison in Midtown. Officials say the project will take 18 months to build. The entrance will sit below a new office building that will be built by private developer Boston Properties. But MTA chair, Jan O'Leber, says the first priority is the district. new entrance, which will accommodate people with disabilities. Before beginning construction of a massive new office tower, Boston Properties is getting

started on a fully ADA accessible entrance. We have to prioritize the public benefits from this project, first and foremost. MTA officials plan to build several new entrances into Grand Central Madison so people can get to their Long Island Railroad trains faster. They also say the new office building will generate $1 billion from ground rent and property taxes, for the MTA. Accessibility is also top of mind for some parents and advocates. They're calling for major improvements to New York City's school bus system. Molly Sannack is from the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York.

Speaking at a city council hearing this week, she said many students with disabilities spend as long as two hours on the bus and still don't get to their schools on time. She says sometimes the bus doesn't come at all. Students are missing classes, if not entire school days, which is contributing to New York City's 36% rate of chronic absenteeism. Contracts for the city's school buses expire next summer, raising fears that drivers may threaten to go on strike.

Since May, more than 1,100 stores in New York City have been padlocked for selling cannabis without a license. In some areas, that's left behind a trail of empty storefronts at a time when vacancies are already high. WMYC's Caroline Lewis looks at which neighborhoods have been most affected and what it takes to get the padlocks off. There's one over there, a green apple cannabis club. I want to see if that's one of them.

Look at that. Oh, yeah. Right next door. It's amazing. Commercial real estate broker Francisco Gonzalez is accompanying me on a tour of the Lower East Side weed shops that have been shut down. City data shows the neighborhood is home to the zip code with the most cannabis store violations.

Elsewhere in the city, clusters of stores have been hit with summonses along commercial. commercial corridors, such as Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, and Broadway on the Upper West Side. Gonzalez says the sluggish post-pandemic real estate market may have motivated some landlords to rent to cannabis shops. The owners saw opportunity, they saw money signs, and they charge more, and they ask for a lot more. Cian Mizrahi is the president of Mizrahi Realty, which owns three Lower East Side buildings that have had cannabis stores shut down. Well, one store, we got packed the keys already, fairly quickly. Ms. Rahi says the other two tenants are continuing to pay rent while their cases play out. New York City Sheriff Anthony Miranda has the authority to keep stores padlocked for up to a year.

But he says that's not his goal. This administration wants a legally operating business to be able to take over the commercial space as soon as possible. According to the sheriff's office, about 140 stores that were sealed have reopened following a hearing with the city. In some cases, because the sealing order wasn't served properly, About the same number of shuttered shops have been returned to landlords after tenants gave up their leases and left. But some stores are stuck in limbo as shop owners fight the closures in court. As for the shops, realtor Sian Mizrahi rented, which were later shut down, he says he didn't know what his tenants were up to. We don't pry into people's businesses.

We rent them a store. They told us they were going to open up a smoke shop. Smoking is legal. And we said, okay, that's a viable business. The city council passed a law last year to penalize landlords who knowingly rent to unlicensed weed shops, but the sheriff's office says no fines have been issued so far. That's WMYC's Caroline Lewis. Is New York City becoming the capital of TikTok?

More on that after the break. If you're strolling around New York, there's a chance you've run into somebody making a TikTok video. They use the street as their film said, asking, random people, all kinds of questions, what they do for a living, what makes them confident, how much their outfit costs. Often, it's just someone with a smartphone. But increasingly, professional production studios are behind these seemingly organic videos. For more, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with WMYC's Ryan Kylath.

So you talked to the company behind a TikTok show with 25 million views. Are there a lot of studios like this? Yeah. So I talked to a bunch of creator economy. experts and investors. And they all said this model is pretty common by now, the studio model. The studio I looked at is called Gymnasium. And you've probably never heard of the studio, but a lot of people know their biggest show, their smash hit.

It's called Boy Room. This is a show where the host, Rachel Koster, investigates the bedrooms of 20-something men in New York. Disaster. Yeah. Every episode is like, you know, 90 seconds. And collectively the first season got 25 million views. So the founder of the studio, his name's Adam Faze. He also produced this show called Keep the Meter Running, which is really popular.

That's where this local guy, Karim Rama, jumps in a cab and says, take me to your favorite spot and keep the meter running. Goes on adventure with cab drivers around New York. Yeah, right on. And the founder, who's never in front of the camera, he's like this cigar-chomping pinstripe suit wearing old Hollywood media mogul in the body of a skinny 20s. seven-year-old. Okay, so these guys have some hit shows, right? But is it a fad? Apps come and go. I mean, I know. Are these kinds of videos going to go away? Well, gymnasium's betting the farm that they

are not going away. They raised $750,000 at a $7.5 million valuation by pitching TikTok as the future of television. Here's the founder, Adam Pace. Like, I actually think we're watching the creation of a whole new medium. I think short from his here to stay. And so what I'm surprised by is that we are still in the wild, wild west. And it doesn't really feel like there's, quote, unquote, a real business here yet. But we all know that this is the future because it is where we're spending all of our time. Yeah, the guy lives on his phone. And his whole point here is that this is where we live now. He wants to make television that you don't have to go anywhere for. It comes to you where you already are. And he calls New York the capital of TikTok. This is pretty intuitive if you live here,

but phases from L.A., which, let's just say, doesn't have an especially rich street life and pedestrian culture with, you know, people running into each other. And it doesn't make a great place for spontaneous interactions that you can film and make great TikToks from. You know, also, TikTok as a platform is professionalizing. When TikTok really took off in early COVID, it was in Los Angeles then. It was creator houses and hype houses and, you know, hot people dancing on video. It was that app. Now it's a platform for presidential politics. Kamala Harris was on a New York City TikTok show, a music quiz show, man on the street show.

Tim Walz was on Karim Rama's other big show, which is called Subway Takes. This is where he goes on the subway clips. You've seen it. Clips a microphone to a metric card and does 90-second interviews, you know, asking people for their hot take about whatever. Now, is this happening everywhere or is it just New York City? I mean, the interesting thing is, obviously big brands as the platform professionalizes, are getting interested in TikTok. And New York is the home of the marketing and advertising industries. So while creators are moving here to take advantage of New York City as a great backdrop and set for all of their content,

they're also much closer to the money that's pouring into the industry every day. So, Ryan, what is the goal here? Is it to get a traditional TV deal? In some ways, this is light years ahead of traditional TV, right? You look at shows, New York shows like Saturday Night Live or the Tonight Show. They cost millions of dollars per episode. And lots of us don't watch the whole show anymore. We just wait for the best bits to bubble up on social media. And then we watch those. These short form studios, Faze and Kareem Rama, they're saying, what if we just cut the runtime, cut the overhead, just make the clips for a couple thousand dollars or whatever. And that's the show. So Faze is, you. He's trying to build a long-term media empire here. He looks at every show from a revenue potential perspective. For example, the second season of Boy Room, where they investigate Boys' Rooms, the first season with such a hit, they've now partnered with an e-commerce furniture giant, you can probably name, to shoot season two in four cities and actually renovate the boys' rooms.

The cash from that deal is going to fund a year of operations for gymnasium. So let me play one final clip from Adam Faye's here. I'm excited for when people start leaving traditional Hollywood and realizing that we're having way more fun over here. It's the greatest thing that's ever happened in my life. It's like I have to ask for zero permission. I actually get to make things and they connect with millions of people in a span of a few weeks.

He's trying to recreate the history of television all on short form and basically put Hollywood on your phone. That's WMYC's Ryan Kylath, talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.