Evening Roundup: No Heat or Hot Water for Some NYCHA Residents, NYPD Begins Overnight Subway Patrol, Old Subway Cars Fixed in Even Older Repair Shops, and a ...

Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. Thousands of New York City public housing residents are dealing with heat and hot water outages as dangerously cold temperatures grip the region. On the Upper East Side Tuesday morning, the Holmes Towers complex had no heat or hot water, though they were later restored. Residents like Amanda Flores say the issues typically recur over the winter.

Amanda Flores: I feel like the hot water is almost never on and we kind of have to constantly be calling to report it and nothing really ever gets done.

Janae Pierre: Flores says she and her grandmother often boil water in a pot to bathe. As of Tuesday afternoon, several other complexes were facing outages in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. NYCHA says it's working to bring back service to those complexes. Governor Kathy Hochul's plan to put more law enforcement on the New York City subway is officially underway. Mayor Eric Adams and Hochul say the six-month effort will put 300 officers on nearly all 150 overnight trains in the first phase. That's roughly two officers per train between 9:00 at night and 5:00 in the morning.

Officials argue the plan will reduce crime and the fear of crime. They also plan to install new protective barriers and LED lighting on platforms, as well as strengthening mental health policies as part of the initiative. Coming up, we continue to look into the state of New York City's crumbling subway system. That's after the break.

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Janae Pierre: About 40% of New York City's subway cars date back to the 1980s, and they're constantly breaking down. Now the MTA is asking state lawmakers for billions to replace them and upgrade the buildings where the trains are fixed. WNYC's Ramsey Khalifeh recently visited the MTA's subway repair shops.

Ramsey Khalifeh: At a depot perched 20ft above the street in East New York, some of the city's oldest subway trains are rolling in for repairs.

Pete: We got trains moving. It's a dangerous situation.

Ramsey Khalifeh: These trains carry riders on the 3 line, which runs from Brooklyn up to Harlem. They break down eight times as often as the MTA's newest subway cars. This depot called Livonia Yard is where mechanics repair these old cars, and like the trains, the building is out of date and breaking down.

Pete: The pits where most of the maintenance is done underneath the train are very shallow. The overhead power system in the facility is antiquated. Ventilation in this building is not good. The cement is cracking and flaking up. We patch it and patch it and patch it and other spots flake up. There's a-- [crosstalk]

Ramsey Khalifeh: That's Pete [unintelligible 00:03:19], the yard superintendent. His shop is more than 100 years old, and he says it desperately needs an overhaul. On the day I visit, it's freezing inside because one of the boilers is out. Workers also complain of rat infestations in their break room. The women's locker room is the size of a small storage closet, and crews have a hard time fixing the trains because the MTA doesn't have enough parts to replace the broken ones.

Many of those parts are so old they're no longer manufactured. In fact, [unintelligible 00:03:46] says he's forced to strip working parts from a broken train just to make another one function.

Pete: Instead of those two hours that I could be using to fix another train, I'm spending two hours taking apart a train.

Ramsey Khalifeh: He says the state of Livonia Yard makes it really difficult to run full service on the three lines.

Pete: Unfortunately, our performance has gone down over the past year.

Ramsey Khalifeh: The other issue, according to MTA officials, is the yard can't handle modern subway trains. Before the agency can buy new cars for the three line, the yard itself has to be renovated or rebuilt entirely. The MTA wants to pay for that renovation as a part of its proposed $65 billion plan being debated by lawmakers in Albany. MTA chair Janno Lieber says this type of work is more important than building brand new train lines like the 2nd Avenue subway extension to East Harlem.

Janno Lieber: It's great to build shiny new palaces. We love making new lines, but we gotta make sure that the system we have doesn't fall apart, and Livonia is maybe one of the two or three best models of that issue.

Ramsey Khalifeh: Another jarring example of that issue can be found on the northern end of the one line in the Bronx.

Willie Specht: Look at this place. It's very gray, dark, and dingy. It just doesn't have a good shop feel to it.

Ramsey Khalifeh: That's Willie Specht, superintendent of MTA's 240th Street yard. He takes me outside the building.

Willie Specht: Okay, so you see the strapping on the building? This building moves so much that they had to secure the building and keep it from crumbling.

Ramsey Khalifeh: The bricks outside the building are literally held in place by metal cables and netting. They're the only things preventing the walls from falling down.

Willie Specht: [inaudible 00:05:20] [crosstalk] holding the structure together. I'm not sure how the engineers came up with it, but it seems to be working.

Ramsey Khalifeh: There's also a chimney filled with holes. According to Specht, bricks sometimes fly off and come raining down.

Willie Specht: That's an age problem. It's very old.

Ramsey Khalifeh: When workers aren't dodging falling bricks, they have to focus on repairing 1 trains, and that's a struggle. The shop doesn't have enough working compressors, a key piece of equipment that powers the train's air brakes. They're bulky and the shop is cramped, and there's only one track with enough space to swap out the compressors. MTA data shows a direct connection between the disrepair at the shop and poor service. Delays on the 1 line caused by faulty train equipment nearly doubled last year. That lack of reliability was front and center last January.

Jennifer Homendy: I want to extend our deepest sympathies to those that were injured in this collision.

Ramsey Khalifeh: That's National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy after two trains crashed on the Upper West Side last year. It all started when a vandal pulled the emergency brakes on a 1 train. Cruise tried to reset the brakes, but Homendy says that system was broken on one of the cars.

Jennifer Homendy: Brakes in the third car back did not reset.

Ramsey Khalifeh: The workers were instructed to drive the broken train backwards. Minutes later, it collided with another train, causing it to derail and injuring more than 20 passengers. Internal MTA reports show the dangerous sequence of events could have been prevented if the brakes on that 1 train simply worked as designed.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Ramsey Khalifeh. New York City is supported by the efforts of people trying to make a difference in their communities. We're calling these New Yorkers community champions. We spoke to Dan Treiber. He was born and raised on City Island in the Bronx. He's made it a goal to serve his community in any way he can, whether it's participating in food and coat drives or making his family's local toy store a hub for gatherings.

Dan Treiber: Dan's Parents' House started when my wife Reina Mia Brill and I bought my childhood home from my parents, and sort of as a joke, we started selling toys from my attic at the Brooklyn Flea Market, and it was accidentally the most successful thing we've ever done in my whole life. Years of doing the Brooklyn Flea led us to purchase our brick-and-mortar store on City Island. It was always important for me to come back home, and it's considerably more important for me to have a storefront in a town that needs storefronts than being another guy that sells objects in Brooklyn.

The storefront from the get go, it was always important to be a community space and not just a place of commerce. Especially post-Covid, it made it important for me to have it be a place where people could get together, so we have a handful of parties every year or book releases every year where people can meet other people, because it takes tiny moments of kindness and open arms that enable people to flourish. It doesn't matter where you came from or what you look like or what you sound like, I want you to feel comfortable walking into our space so you can learn and experience things with other people.

In 2020 was when we really started to engage in direct community action. We started the community fridge, and we put a refrigerator on our property that we got from the South Bronx Mutual Aid. It's not my fridge, it's the people's fridge. We got together and we realized that there was a need for food on City Island and decided we can do this ourselves. It's the same thing that happened with the coat drives, right?

I mean, we've only done a couple, but people said, "Hey, we're going to do this because people are cold and they need warm jackets and people who were looking to do positive things got to do positive things. You can do important things on the micro level that have a really big impact. We sell toys, but we also try to be a positive force in the world, and we do our best to be supportive of the community when needed.

Janae Pierre: Dan Treiber lives on City Island in the Bronx. Thanks for listening to NYC NOW from WNYC. Catch us every weekday three times a day. I'm Janae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.

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