NYC NOW - September 8, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Governor Kathy Hochul signed nine bills into law this week. Plus, a Bronx judge tosses dozens of convictions connected to a former NYPD detective accused of perjury. Also, former President Donald Trump transfers his Bronx golf course lease to Bally’s, a casino company. And finally, we end the week in a few of New York City’s community gardens.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jene Pierre. We begin in Albany, where Governor Kathy Hokel signed nine bills into law this week. One of them bolsters penalties for wage theft and increases the minimum benefit for those receiving workers' compensation. Another law requires schools to proactively alert parents to any advanced placement courses they offer. Hokel says it's about providing opportunity to students of all. all backgrounds. AP classes can get you a leg up. You miss a semester, a year, year and a half of not having to pay tuition. That's pretty darn good. The governor has only made a tiny dent in her to-do list.

She still has 534 bills to sign or veto by the end of the year. Among them include a measure that would seal many criminal convictions after a certain period of time. Another would have the state's study possible reparations for slavery. Now to the Bronx, where a judge has dismissed 67 cases connected to a former NYPD detective accused of lying to secure drug arrests. WNYC's Samantha Max has the details. Hundreds of other convictions have already been tossed out across the city because prosecutors say Joseph Franco may have tainted them. He worked as an undercover narcotics detective before the NYPD fired him in 2020 for making false statements. Franco stood trial earlier

this year in Manhattan on charges of perjury and official misconduct. Prosecutors accused him of lying about drug sales he said he had witnessed. But a judge dismissed the case partway through his trial because prosecutors didn't turn over all the evidence they were legally required to share with the defense. The purging of Trump signs continues in New York City. City officials say former President Donald Trump has transferred his lease on a Bronx golf course to Bally's, the Casino and Resort Company. City Comptroller Brad Lander approved the deal, along with the City Parks Department. In a statement to WNYC, he said, quote,

I'm delighted that Trump's name will no longer deface city parkland. Bally's has been reportedly vying for one of the three new casino licenses in New York. Trump's name has already been removed from multiple buildings and a hotel, along with a skating rink in Central Park. Stick around. We'll check in at a few community gardens after the break. A welcome space for migrants, a place to grow produce or harvest rainwater. New York's community gardens aren't just pretty sites.

They're places where residents jointly decide what it means to be a good neighbor. But getting there has come with serious political hurdles. WNYC's Arun Vanekapal has more. It's a Saturday night at Bushwick City Farm, a community garden in Brooklyn, and a movie's being screened. The movies' group. called War Witch. It's about a 12-year-old girl in Africa who's forced to become a child soldier. The audience in this case consists of several migrants who are themselves from various African nations and have been staying in a shelter across a street from the garden, along with hundreds of other men.

Umar Barry is 27 and originally from Mauritania and spoke to me through an interpreter. We love the garden because we can cook our traditional foods. and after a long day of getting rejected from job after job and just struggling, it's nice to sit with our brothers and watch a movie and eat, and it reminds us of home. Which is exactly what the volunteers at the Garden have tried to do, collectively welcome migrants. This is what makes community gardens unusual. They're public places where private citizens have to jointly decide the best use of a precious resource. Bill de Paola is a founder of the Environmental Group Times Up,

and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. I caught up with him at La Plaza Community Garden in the East Village. And it's five buildings that were kind of on fire or fell down, and people rushed in here without help from the city, and they created this beautiful garden. That was in the 1970s. He rattled off some of the deliberations that have taken place since then. Someone said, hey, I want to make a rock that cleans the water.

And everybody's like, okay. Someone else said, I want to grow my tomatoes or I want to grow my lettuce. And someone's, sure, you could have this piece of land over here. An amphitheater, medicinal garden, rainwater harvesting. De Pallas says all of these things coexist at La Plaza because neighbors came together over decades and decided as much. This collectivist spirit is fostered at hundreds of reclaimed spaces, but in the 1990s it hit a wall in the form of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The era of communism, Giuliani proclaimed, is over. He said the city would auction many of the gardens off to the highest bidder. That prompted a massive, attack. times kooky public outcry. Protesters, many dressed up as fruits and vegetables, have held rallies in Bryant Park, a sit-in at City Hall. This is a 1999 WNYC story that recounted the civil disobedience and mass arrests that took place over the course of months.

The calls across the city were for the mayor to stop the auction. In another instance, a group of activists called Jiminy Cricket released 10,000 live crickets inside a crowded auditorium at police headquarters, causing complete chaos. There was this surge, this voice that just had to be heard. Lynn Kelly moved to Brooklyn in the mid-90s. She was a young white woman from Staten Island who'd grown up around lots of gardens and parks. In Brooklyn, Kelly noticed many communities didn't have green space. Soon she entered city government, and she connected the outcry over community gardens to the cultural

awakening taking place in music through local artists like The Notorious BIG. All the New York-based artists for hip-hop were also emerging and voicing in their lyrics, the experiences of their communities. Many of the same communities that were protesting in front of City Hall about lack of green space. The outcry paid off. Giuliani relented, thanks to a last minute, $4.2 million donation from the Trust for Public Land. And the New York Restoration Project, started by singer and actress Bet Midler. She said, we have to do something about this. We can't wait these gardens be sold off. More than 100 community gardens were saved, and Kelly has since become the executive director

of the New York Restoration Project. But many gardens today are bootstrap operations, run by volunteers who simply believe in a better world. These include James McDonough, who's been arranging those film screenings at Bushwick City Farm. He says he's partly influenced by the ideology of anarchists. It's that everyone deserves shelter, food, a roof over their head, clothing, and whatever is necessary to make that happen, it needs to be done. As the migrants around him sat in the dark, quietly taking in Warwich, McDonoughed gesture to the bus from which the movie screen hung. This space could be best summed up. There's a slogan on the bus, which is now obscured, but it says, don't just dream of utopias, build them. That's WNYC's Arun Vanekapal.

All this week, we've been talking about community gardens across the five boroughs. We visited a few of them recently and asked folks what it means to them to have access to green space in New York City. Kim Yim is the president of Pleasant Village Community Garden in East Harlem. It's an outlet for people to come together and grow food, grow plants, learn about nature, be out in open space, you know, just being away from the hectic day of the city. You know, we don't have an attachment to nature being in the city. Everything is made out of concrete, so it's nice looking around, seeing things grow, being excited about, you know, certain vegetables and certain flowers, blooming at, you know, certain times, finding issues and figuring them out and how to fix them.

It's a sense of community between all of us that we enjoy doing. On the weekends, it's like very normal to hear like live bands, a lot of music, people dancing, kids running around. So it's very playful. I live in the neighborhood. It's a community garden. And I would walk past the garden all the time. And I was so curious to see what was going on,

but I was too shy to say anything. And I was on the phone with my friend, and I was like, I just want to see what's going on in there. She's like, just ask. Like, there's someone there. So I asked. And it was a lovely person who gave me a tour and told me all about the garden

and sent me home with maybe Sage, something like that. And I was just so happy. And I'm like, you know, I want to come here more often. And then now I have a baby. And the garden is someplace that I'm able to come with him. And he's able to put his feet in the dirt. And he's always pulling flowers. Very, very tough.

He doesn't know gentle quite yet. But he's getting there, actually. And he just likes to explore and discover. And, I mean, if you just watch him in here, he's just looking at everything. And it's a really special place for us. Danielle King Powell is part of Morning Glory Community Garden in the Bronx. Just a few of the voices we've highlighted this week as we explore the value of green space in New York City. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC.

Quick shout out to our production team. It includes Sean Boutage, Amber Bruce, Ave Carrillo, Audrey Cooper, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jarrettz, Jarrett, Jared Marcell, and Wayne Schoemeister, with help from the entire WNYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the folks at Buck, and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrado. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have a great weekend. We'll be back Monday.