Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at how two residents on Roosevelt Island who are fighting the demolition of an old steam plant prepared a lawsuit against the city. We’ll also get details on a plan to cool a sweltering subway station by capturing the summer heat.
The paperwork for Case No. 158628/2026, filed last month in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, looked like just another Article 78 proceeding, as cases that challenge decisions by government agencies in New York are called. This one took issue with the demolition of a dilapidated city-owned steam plant on Roosevelt Island, where the two plaintiffs live.
What is unusual about Case No. 158628/2026 is that the two plaintiffs are not lawyers, and they say that the petition was prepared with help from artificial intelligence.
The plaintiffs, Rachel Dowling and Tibor Istvan Krisko, are part of a loosely organized network of island residents who have been fighting the city’s efforts to raze the steam plant.
Their petition says that the demolition — as well as the trucks coming and going from the site — has released potentially hazardous airborne dust and particulate matter and that required environmental reviews have not been conducted. That has endangered Dowling and Krisko, who live in apartment buildings across from the plant, the petition says.
ArchRI, a group that includes some of the residents who helped with the Article 78 proceeding, has collected more than 2,200 signatures for a separate, public petition demanding that the demolition stop. (Work on the demolition has already been put on hold because of temporary stop-work orders from the Department of Buildings and the Department of Environmental Protection.)
Article 78 petitions have been filed in cases large and small. Donald Trump used an Article 78 proceeding in 2024 to sue the judge assigned to preside over his hush-money trial. Trump lost the proceeding and was eventually convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
But Trump’s petition was filed by lawyers, and lawyers are expensive: The Roosevelt Islanders say that lawyers they consulted wanted retainer fees of as much as $30,000. So the group behind the petition thought it made more sense to try a do-it-yourself approach, Krisko said.
“ChatGPT is not a lawyer,” said Krisko, a physician who specializes in gastroenterology, “but it’s our best tool as activist citizens.”
A.I. software like ChatGPT and Claude provided pointers on the whys and wherefores that are as much a part of a lawyer’s lingo as gallstones and polyps are a part of Krisko’s. The technology offered guidance on how to structure an Article 78 petition, with separate sections headed “nature of the proceeding” and “timeliness, finality and ripeness.”
Krisko said that the group was careful to avoid the embarrassment that had clouded cases where A.I. went rogue: The petition contains no references to made-up precedents. Before citing the Civil Practice Law and Rules, which governs civil cases in the state, the group looked it up.
“We weren’t trying to sue with inflammatory legal action,” Krisko said, adding that the group just wanted “to be reassured that what is being done” — the demolition — “is being done the right way.”
He said that no such reassurance had come from meetings with officials of city agencies, even after elected officials, including the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, set up a community advisory group and scheduled monthly meetings.
The Article 78 petition says that the plant was decommissioned more than a decade ago and was in disrepair by mid-2024, when the Department of Buildings issued an emergency order authorizing its demolition. Another city agency — the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — hired a contractor to tear it down.
The petition asks for a hearing to be held next month. But Kalin Kresnitchki, a Roosevelt Island resident who also worked on the Article 78 filing, said that another hearing would come first, on Sept. 3. That will focus on the stop-work order issued by the Department of Buildings, which was issued after ArchRI members complained that demolition had started on one of the smokestacks without required safety precautions.
The second stop-work order, from the Department of Environmental Protection, was issued after inspectors found asbestos in the walls of the plant. The State Department of Environmental Conservation had earlier halted the excavation of fuel tanks outside the plant for nearly a week after residents complained about an oil spill there.
Kim Moscaritolo, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said that the agency expected the stop-work orders to be lifted and demolition to resume “before the end of the year.”
In the meantime, Kresnitschki said, “we’re still looking to find legal representation.”
Weather
Today will be mostly sunny with temperatures soaring near 90. Tonight, expect mostly cloudy skies and a low around 72.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Feast of the Assumption).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It’s about learning how to learn.” — Damian Woetzel, the president of the Juilliard School of Music, on why the 75th anniversary of its dance department is an opportunity to “look back and consider what a dance education can be.”
The latest New York news
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A fight over delivery workers: Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed the Delivery Protection Act, a measure pending before the City Council that is aimed at regulating the “last-mile” operations of Amazon, FedEx and other distribution companies. It would require them to hire delivery workers rather than rely on contractors.
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A boat tour turns deadly: Alexander Reyes chartered a boat and invited 11 friends to celebrate his wife’s birthday. What happened next — the boat capsized, killing Sara Sánchez and her infant daughter, Antonella — is now part of a federal investigation.
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He wrote about killer robocars: Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner, thinks autonomous vehicles are the future. But his book “Autokill,” co-written with Cary Pepper, imagines a world where they go very wrong.
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‘Building one great newspaper’: In a world of failing newspapers, The Chronicle, of Glens Falls, N.Y., is still finding readers. Mark Frost, its founder, spent decades cultivating readers face to face, often while replenishing newspaper racks and thanking everyone he sees taking a copy.
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Living on $11,400 in the Bronx: Richard Sencion, a graduate student at Fordham University who goes from gig to gig, hopes to move out of his parents’ apartment. “New Yorkers are hustlers,” he said. “I think that makes us unique and special.”
Cooling the subway, heating buildings
The temperature was already above 80 on the street when Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the state agency that runs the transit system, descended into a notoriously hot subway station in Lower Manhattan.
Mamdani compared the space to a “chamber of horrors” — steamy, sticky, sweaty and unbearable.
He and Lieber were there yesterday to talk about a study to test something that sounds too good to be true, especially on such a hot day: an underground air-exchange system that would cool stations in the summer and heat nearby buildings in the winter. The idea is to drill holes more than 500 feet below an unused subway platform and siphon excess heat into pipes connected to nearby municipal buildings, including City Hall.
Lieber — who, like Mamdani, kept his suit jacket on during a news conference in the sweltering station — said that if the system lived up to its billing, it could serve as a model that could be used elsewhere in the 472-station subway network.
Lieber said that it was not clear how much cooler the heat-exchange system could make the station — but that “even a few degrees” would mean “the difference between total misery and merely sweltering.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Mugged by a squirrel
Dear Diary:
One fine spring afternoon, I was mugged by a squirrel.
I was visiting New York from Denver. I had heard about the dangers of the city and about how one had to be on guard.
I had just visited the Empire State Building and was walking down Fifth Avenue. I stopped at a bench near Madison Square Park to rest my feet and enjoy some sliced apples.
No sooner had I sat down than a gray squirrel leaped up onto my knee. It cocked its head and looked at the apple slice I was holding.
“What the heck?” I said.
The squirrel started climbing up my chest. Screeching like a child, I dropped the apple and stood up.
The squirrel pounced on the apple and scampered a few steps away.
I, too, scampered a few steps away, and then turned and looked back.
The squirrel seemed to have a “You want a piece of me?” expression on its face.
I shrugged, sighed and walked away. Who in Denver was going to believe I got mugged by a squirrel?
— Chris Marshall
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Using A.I. to Stop the Demolition of an Old Steam Plant appeared first on New York Times.
