NYC NOW - October 14, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with Matt Green, who recently completed his goal to walk every single street in New York City. Plus, WNYC’s David Furst finds the best soup in the city with Eater New York’s Melissa McCart.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. This is our one and only episode today. We're taking the day off to observe the holiday. But the news doesn't stop. Here's your headlines from Michael Hill. A train operator has died after a tree fell onto a train line in Burlington County early this morning. Investigators say the southbound train from Trenton ran into the tree on the tracks of the River

line light rail train just after six this morning. Aside from the conductor, 42 people were on board the train, NJ Transit says the crash hurt 23 of them. New Jersey Transit Police are investigating. Service on the river line remains suspended this morning or this afternoon between Florence and Trenton. Officials are providing bus service as a substitute. A ballot proposal facing voters next month could greatly increase the power of New York City's sanitation department. officials say the ballot measure would clarify where sanitation employees have jurisdiction. But opponents say the proposal's language does not make clear that it gives the sanitation department more power to crack that on street vendors in city parks.

Karina Guffman Gutierrez is with the street vendor project. She says it will put more pressure on people struggling to make a living. This is actually just adding another enforcement arm to street vending and parks, where already the Parks Department is in charge of vending. The NYPD can also issue fines. The proposal is one of six on the bad. Early voting begins October 26. 63 and sunny now on this holiday.

Remember alternate side parking is suspended, but we still must pay the parking meters. Partly sunny and 65 and gusty today, temperature dropping to the mid-50s the rest of the day. Last month, a man named Matt Green completed his goal to walk every single street in New York City. After the break, we'll hear about his years-long trek. Stick around for the conversation.

Walking the streets of New York City is something millions of people do every day. But what about walking every single street in New York City? Well, Matt Green did that last month. After resting his legs a bit, he talked with my colleague, Sean Carlson. So Matt, what inspired you to walk every day? Street in New York City. I used to be a civil engineer and I sat at a desk a lot and I was always trying to figure out something else to do. And I first succeeded in quitting that job and doing something else in 2010. I did a walk across America. Oh, cool. From Rockaway Beach here in New York to

I found there's a town in Oregon called Rockaway Beach. It took about five months. It was just kind of a life-changing thing. I would just knock on people's doors asking if I could camp in their yards. and it just gave me this sense that there was this life that was possible that didn't involve working a job and paying rent. And so when I came back to New York after that, you know, I worked a few odd jobs here and there, but I was trying to figure out the next thing to do. And I'd heard of people who'd walked every block of Manhattan, which was a fascinating idea to me because it kind of turned on its head the way we normally think about New York as a like best of kind of place. Like there's so much stuff, you have to make sure you see the highlights. And the idea of just

going everywhere. Like everywhere is equal. Don't worry about. comparing stuff, just appreciate wherever you are for whatever it is. I started to wonder if I could maybe do that for all five boroughs. So obviously walking every street in New York City, you can't do that in one day. How long did it take to walk all the streets? It took me over 12 and a half years. There were different phases of at the very beginning. It was like super intense walking every day. I got more into researching things that I was seeing and that started taking up more time and I was walking less. The pandemic hit. I didn't have anywhere to couch surf or cat sit in New York City during pandemic. So I went down, lived with my parents in Virginia for about 16 months, came back,

kind of finished it up slowly as I was working some other jobs. How do you use your senses, like your sight and your hearing and your smell when you're walking around? And what notable things do you remember of that? I think most people in New York, you know, I mean, maybe you're going to work or maybe you're going to see a friend or you're going to do something fun, but you're kind of always on the way to a point. And like whatever's in between you and that point, maybe you're paying attention to it, maybe you're not, but you're kind of focused on that end goal. And with this walk, there was never an end goal. It was just to be in one block after another after another.

And what I realize is that when I take away that concept of like looking forward to something else, all of a sudden I'm just much more immersed in where I am. And so you realize how like limited you are in a lot of other ways of being in the world because all your senses just naturally open up. You know, the sounds start seeping in. And, you know, the longer you walk, the more attuned you become to sounds and smells. And, you know, sometimes it's really overwhelming. You know, you're by an L train or something, and it's just screeching and screeching.

I mean, most of what people know about New York City is visual because there's so many spectacular visuals in the city. And walking around, you just get this sense that it's really a full, of course, like immersive place. It's not just this iconic thing that exists in the media. Do you think this is something that other New Yorkers should do? Yeah, definitely. It could be just walk every street in your neighborhood. There's probably streets that are not far from where you live, that you've just never walked down. because they're not on the way to the subway, they're not on the way of the restaurant you like to go to.

And you start to realize really quickly how much is just hidden in the world. What's one of the most memorable moments you had on your walks? A couple days ago, before I finished, I did my last walk in the Bronx. And so this was just, you know, whatever happened to be left in the Bronx, it wasn't some special route I'd saved or anything. So I start walking at City Island, and I'm going up into Pelham Bay Park. And so I'm coming over the bridge from City Island. And if you look to your left, you see the Rodman's Neck Peninsula, which is where the NYPD has his firing range. So down there, there's like a sailboat tipped over and washed up on the shore.

And I can hear this like barrage of bullets from the firing range. And you hear this guy on a megaphone, like, chastising people about making sure they pick up all the shells after they're done shooting. And then he's like telling somebody to stop looking at their smartphone. And then you hear like, I mean, I don't know how many people they were shooting. It sounded like a thousand guns. And, you know, so then I walk up into Pelham Bay Park. There's a little island called Two Trees Island, which is only accessible when it's not high tide. All these different worlds of New York City that all combine into one thing.

And, you know, that's just part of one day of a walk. And it was just like that over and over and over and over for all these years. You know, you mentioned Staten Island, and that raises an interesting question. What are some of the differences between walking in the different boroughs? I mean, not only could I not sum up a borough, I can't even like, when you walk every block in a neighborhood, you realize there's nothing you can say about the neighborhood because that block is so different from that block. And the person you met there makes that feel like a completely different place than this other place two blocks away. I think maybe that's another one of the big lessons of this walk is that that whole idea of characterizing places really breaks down the more you get to know a place.

You know, it's a lot easier to have like a stereotype or generalization about a place when you've just been there once or you know a little bit about it. Just like with anybody you know, you know, someone who doesn't know them well would just could describe them. few adjectives, but anyone you know really well is you realize how complex they are. And it's, you know, the same thing with the city or even with just an individual block. So you've walked from one end of the country to another. You've walked every street in New York City. What's next? Is there anything next? What do you do after that? How do you top that? I don't know. I mean, it took about 18 months, I think, after I finished the cross-country walk to kind of start this walk. And, you know, I didn't even have the idea of doing this necessarily for a while. So I don't know

what's next. I mean, I feel like when you're really deep into something, finish it before you start worrying about what's coming up next. So, yeah, so I have no idea, but I'm open to recommendations. That's Matt Green, talking with WMYC's Sean Carlson. Fall has fallen in New York City, and as we continue our journey into the cooler weather, it's the perfect time to talk about hot soup. WMYC's David First talked with Eater, New York editor, Melissa McCart, about places with the best soups in the city. But, Malmysk's, David First, But Melissa starts by sharing two reasons why she loves soup so much. Number one is soup is a bit akin to bakeries.

You can get something really interesting and delicious and it's not super expensive. And then the second reason I like it is because as I've been learning about chefs and restaurants in my long career, a lot of chefs have told me you could really tell the style and technique of a chef by how they make soup. And so generally, if I'm going to a new restaurant, I try to get the soup to sort of suss out a chef's style before I go into some of their other dishes. Well, Eater, New York has returned to the subject of soup several times over the years. We can't cover everything, but where should we go to try some of the best soups in the city? We have a lentil soup from Jean-George on the Upper East Side. We have a matzo ball soup at Brooklyn Diner.

Another great soup is Shecrab soup at Have and Marr. It's a Marcus Samuelson restaurant. I love a seafood soup, and theirs is particularly beautiful, you know, that nice shade of orange and sort of Caribbean meets the Carolinas. And what's that restaurant again? The restaurant is Have and Mar. It's at 245th Avenue at West 26th Street. Lunchtime is feeling closer by the moment. You know, soup is often served. as an appetizer. How about soup as the main event? Where would you go for soup as your meal? One of my favorite places is Raku, and there are two locations. There's one in the East Village, and there's a brand new one in Times Square, and that is an Udon place. There are udon noodles made of buckwheat are really flavorful and sort of bouncy. You can get all kinds of add-ins in terms of meats or seafoods or vegetables. I love to get seaweed in it because it's so green and vibrant and it just adds to that very, very savory flavor. I know this is an impossible question,

but if you had to pick a favorite, what is your go-to soup in the city? Oh my gosh. I can't believe you're asking me this, but I can't believe I have an answer. My favorite soup in all of the city is the beef noodle soup at Ho Foods in the East Village. It is a very tiny place at 110 East 7th Street. The owner is named Richard Ho, H.O. So he called it Ho Foods. It's a classic Taiwanese soup. It's made with beef shank. The broth is made with lots of bones, so it's very rich. And then it's dressed with scallions and cilantro and fermenting. mustard greens that give it a little bit of kick. You have a choice of thin or wide noodles, and if you want to make it spicy, you can add the beef fat hot sauce, which is terrific.

This is the beef noodle soup at Ho Foods. It is $22 and it is worth every dollar. That's Eater, New York editor, Melissa McCart, talking with WMYC's David First. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. Enjoy the holiday. We'll be be back on a regular schedule tomorrow.