Elected officials and Brooklynites call on City Hall to reverse course on McGuinness Boulevard project

Chants of “McGuinness Safe Now,” rang out from a crowd of around 40 people in City Hall Park on Thursday. They held signs plastered with the names of pedestrians who were killed by cars on Greenpoint’s McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn. 

McGuinness is a deadly road that was about to get approval for a complete pedestrian and cyclist-focused design overhaul from the city Department of Transportation – but a week and a half ago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams ordered the city Department of Transportation to come up with alternatives to the redesign plan that took two years to create, as first reported by Streetsblog.

Elected officials representing Greenpoint, road safety advocates and residents rallied on Thursday to call on the mayor to reverse his decision on the proposal. New York City Council Members Lincoln Restler and Jennifer Gutiérrez, state Sens. Julia Salazar and Kristen Gonzalez, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Public Advocate Jumanne Williams spoke at the rally.

“We’re out here today so that the mayor can hear us in City Hall, so that his staff can hear us in City Hall,” Restler said. “It is not too late for them to do the right thing, to finally make McGuinness safe.”

McGuinness Boulevard, originally just a regular street called Oakland Street, is a mile-long thoroughfare that was widened in the 1950s to handle increased car traffic between the Pulaski Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The road is prone to many accidents that have resulted in three deaths and 229 crashes with injuries within just the past decade, according to city Department of Transportation data.

The boulevard is currently structured as a four-lane street – one 10-foot wide lane in each direction, one 11-foot wide lane in each direction, a 16-foot wide median separating the two directions, an 8-foot wide parking lane in each direction and then an 11-foot wide sidewalk on either end. The now shot-down plan from DOT was to replace the 10-foot wide travel lane and the 8-foot wide parking lane in both directions with a 7-foot wide bike lane, protected by a 3-foot wide chevron barrier, and an 8-foot wide pedestrian plaza/parking lane on one side.

Greenpointers, traffic safety advocates, local elected officials and even the mayor all supported the DOT’s reconstruction plans for McGuinness. 

The department had done significant outreach to gauge the community’s thoughts on the project, which had included another reconstruction option for the road, which ended up being less popular. According to a DOT report, it held three community workshops (one of which had Polish translation), one Community Board 1 visit, one town hall, 403 responses to on-the-ground outreach to pedestrians, 46 responses to a local merchant survey and more than 750 comments on an interactive online map showing the proposed changes. At the culmination of all this outreach was the decision that the plan was ready for the mayor’s approval.

It’s common for the DOT to seek the mayor’s verbal approval of some plans before moving forward with them. For the McGuinness project, this verbal approval was supposed to come during a July 3 Zoom meeting with DOT representatives, Adams, several mayoral staffers and Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, according to reporting from The City.

It didn’t.

Instead, Adams sided with his top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who has been verbally opposed to the plan for a while, and told the DOT to come up with alternative plans for McGuinness.

Opposition to the plan didn’t just come from Lewis-Martin, though. Two major Adams donors, sibling duo Gina and Tony Argento, also were opposed to the plan. The Argentos own Broadway Stages, a film production company that’s headquartered in Greenpoint and that has several sound stages in the area. According to Streetsblog’s reporting, the family has donated more than $15,000 to Adams’ political campaigns.

At an unrelated press conference on Monday, Adams said that there’s community opposition to the plan. “I'm not going to force feed communities,” Adams said, noting that he’s a biker too. “We will find a way to get what we are looking for – a safe place. And if I decide within my role as the mayor that I want to reexamine and look at other ways of doing it, I'm going to do that.

“This has been a community-driven process long, long before the number of deaths and collisions kept creeping up along McGuinness,” Gutiérrez said. “Every single person here agrees that every collision and every traffic death was preventable. Every death is preventable and the longer we wait to institute commonsense mitigation it’s another risk to our communities, another potential life lost.”

While Reynoso was speaking, a man wearing a “NYC Drivers Unite” shirt interrupted, screaming that Reynoso and Williams are liars and in the mayor’s pocket. When Williams asked the man if he was against the DOT’s McGuinness plan or lives in Greenpoint, he didn’t respond.

“A perfect example of a lobbying effort of one person,” Reynoso said after the counterprotestor was guided away from the speakers, drawing a connection between him and the few opponents of the DOT plan. “This one person is literally a one man show. He has no supporters behind him.”