Evening Roundup: Big Changes Slated for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, AG James Warns of Illegal Discrimination Against Trans Patients, Surf’s Up in New Jersey ...

Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC Now your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre.

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Janae Pierre: Big changes could be coming to Atlantic Avenue, the historic Brooklyn thoroughfare. The Adams administration says a rezoning plan that the City Planning Commission is considering this week would allow for the building of 4,500 new homes. Officials say it would also bring roughly 2,800 long-term jobs. The rezoning would affect a 21-block stretch of the avenue and surrounding blocks from Prospect Heights to Bed Stuy and Crown Heights. The Planning Commission will review it Wednesday before it heads to the City Council for a vote.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is advising healthcare providers to continue offering gender-affirming care to trans patients. In a letter, she says that refusing care could amount to illegal discrimination under the state's human rights law. The guidance follows an executive order from President Trump last week he threatened to pull federal funding from organizations that offer gender-affirming care to minors and NYU Langone then reportedly began canceling their appointments. Last week, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from freezing or withholding funds.

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Janae Pierre: Still ahead, we hop over to New Jersey where some teens there are yelling, "Surf's up." Where? More on that after the break.

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Speaker: This is NYC Now.

Janae Pierre: Lodi, New Jersey is a landlocked working-class town crisscrossed by routes 46 and 80 in the northern part of the Garden State. Not exactly the sort of place that makes you think of surfing, but dozens of teens there share an out-of-place passion for wave riding. Here's reporter Brian Donohue with more.

Brian Donohue: If the borough of Lodi has a national reputation, it's probably, unfortunately, because it's home of the bar that stood in for the Bada Bing where Tony Soprano and his crew hung out. It's the kind of place where if you stand on Main Street with a surfboard like I did, you're going to turn some heads. Any good place for me to surf around here?

Male Speaker: No. Hackensack River.

Brian Donohue: That's it.

Male Speaker: Nah, I don't know, man. You've got to go to Jersey Shore, bud.

Brian Donohue: Though, you don't really have to. There I was on a recent Wednesday night at a surf session of the Lodi High School Surfing Club. In the world's largest indoor surfing wave pool at the DreamWorks Water Park at the American Dream Mall just down Route 17 from Lodi in East Rutherford.

Bonita Osmani: Never in a million years would I ever think I would have touched a surfboard, but here I am.

Brian Donohue: Bonita Osmani joined the club when it started three years ago. She's actually graduated, but she came back this night and barely crushed it. Riding across the face of wave after wave till they fizzled out in the shallow end.

Bonita Osmani: I love it. It brings so much joy to me.

Brian Donohue: There are newbie club members here for their first lesson too.

Teacher: When you fall like a starfish, cover your eyes [crosstalk]

Brian Donohue: Like sophomore Jacob Espiritu.

Jacob Espiritu: My first time-- It was pretty bad, but it was really fun though because I like falling.

Brian Donohue: The club holds three wave-riding sessions in the pool each year. This was the first for 2025. In between, there's fitness training, fundraisers, and watching surf videos.

Teacher: All right, out in the water, surfers, we got just about 28 minutes left out there. Just about 28 minutes. Keep on surfing. Everybody's killing it.

Brian Donohue: The scene is pretty surreal and maybe unique in all the world. 2014's riding and wiping out on waist-high crystal blue waves peeling beneath the cavernous glass ceiling that frames the frigid night sky beyond. Giant sculptures of Shrek and Kung Fu Panda peer down from the rafters, all just yards from the New Jersey Turnpike.

Jacob Espiritu: Yes, baby.

Brian Donohue: At its core, it's a story we all know about a teacher with a passion who found a way to pass it on.

Matt Nicolosi: The wave is artificial, but the stoke is 100% real.

Brian Donohue: That's Lodi High School art teacher Matt Nicolosi, who started the club.

Matt Nicolosi: The only surf club in northern New Jersey.

Brian Donohue: He's a longtime surfer who had a side gig nights and weekends as an instructor at Scud and Surf. That's the company that runs the surf school here.

Matt Nicolosi: It's a spiritual thing for me too. To be able to pass that on or share that with them is amazing. They're part of the tribe now, do you know what I mean? It doesn't matter where they're from, how long they've been surfing, they know what it's like. There's a saying only a surfer knows the feeling. Now they know that feeling.

Brian Donohue: For sophomore Melanie Mejia, that feeling is freedom.

Melanie Mejia: I'm very capable using my arms, not the legs. I'm able to move a lot using my arms. Just the legs is a problem.

Brian Donohue: Melanie was left paralyzed at age eight by an autoimmune disease. Tonight she rolls her wheelchair into the shallows and is the first surfer paddling out to where the waves break in the deep end.

Melanie Mejia: Being in the water feels so much freer than being in a wheelchair, being trapped inside.

Brian Donohue: Her father, Alexander, an immigrant from Peru, watches from the side as Melanie catches wave after wave, riding on her stomach, with a grin bigger than Shrek's.

Alexander Mejia: Yes, I love to see her. She's happy.

Brian Donohue: Here she goes. She's got a wave.

Alexander Mejia: Yes. To see her face happy. Oh, my God.

Brian Donohue: As the session is wrapping up, I'm reminded of an expression among surfers. It goes, the best surfer in the water is the one having the most fun. By that standard, the surfers of Lodi High, thanks to one teacher's passion and New Jersey's strange shopping mall surf break, just might be New Jersey state champs.

Janae Pierre: That's Brian Donohue reporting for WNYC.

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Janae Pierre: Sunsets will be extra special this month for stargazers. All of the planets in the solar system will be on display at twilight. There's also a star that could go nova at any moment. My colleague David Furst talked with WNYC's Rosemary Misdary for an update on the February night skies.

David Furst: For all of the novice astronomers listening, myself included, how rare is it to see all of the planets lined up in a single night?

Rosemary Misdary: It's not that rare. I know that there's outlets that are reporting it happens every billions of years. It doesn't happen every year, but it's not that rare. They're referring to it as a parade of planets, but that doesn't mean that they're marching across the sky in a straight line like you would see in an elementary school classroom poster of all of the planets in a single line. That is not what you're going to see. It just means all the planets are visible and viewable in a single evening. You can spend an entire evening viewing the planets one by one.

David Furst: Okay, so we're talking seven planets here.

Rosemary Misdary: Yes. You can see the Earth if you want. You just look down instead of looking up.

David Furst: Okay, fair enough. Eight planets. Is now the best time to see them, early February?

Rosemary Misdary: This whole month is a perfect time to see these planets.

David Furst: Help me here. Where should I look?

Rosemary Misdary: First, you're going to want to look west and find the planets in order. That's very important. They set at different times. They're not up all night. The first one to set is going to be Mercury. Within a few minutes of sunset, it's going to be gone.

David Fust: Make sure the sun has set before you start staring, looking for Mercury.

Rosemary Misdary: Yes, you're going to want to make sure the sun sets because you don't want to look into the sun. Never, never look into the sun.

David Furst: Okay. Once we've either given up on Mercury or found it safely, what's next?

Rosemary Misdary: Saturn and then Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and then finally Mars. The four brightest of all of these, and they're the ones that you can see with the naked eye, are Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Uranus and Mercury, you're going to need the binoculars for that. Neptune will need a telescope.

David Furst: Okay, what else is there to see this month?

Rosemary Misdary: Orion, the hunter, the constellation is very bright this month. It's one of the most popular constellations to see, and it's also a great constellation to use to locate other objects. What's most interesting is that on the left upper shoulder, that star located there is called Betelgeuse. Don't say that three times. It's a red supergiant star that's at the end of its life, and it's supposed to go nova any moment between now and the next 200 years.

David Furst: Between now and the next 200 years.

Rosemary Misdary: In a universe that's infinite and not bound by time, 200 years is an excellent estimate.

David Furst: It's the blink of an eye.

Rosemary Misdary: Yes. That's the best estimate I can give you. That could happen at any moment. This star is huge. It's 700 times the diameter of the sun and 100,000 times brighter. You're going to want to catch that.

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Janae Pierre: You definitely want to catch that and all of the planets visible in the night skies this month. That's WNYC's Rosemary Misdary talking with my colleague David Furst. 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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