After years of back-and-forth, McGuinness Boulevard is finally getting the full road diet.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the project’s completion soon after taking office in January, promising to implement it once the weather warmed up. Now that summer approaches, the mayor is making good on that promise.
The road diet reduces one traffic lane in each direction and adds a parking lane and a bike lane. Deputy Mayor Julia Kerson and NYC DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn visited Greenpoint today to break ground on the project, which will now extend from Calyer Street to the Pulaski Bridge (the redesign is already in place from Meeker Avenue to Calyer).
“Your passion has been an inspiration to all of us at DOT. But it’s also important to emphasize that change shouldn’t be this difficult,” Commissioner Flynn told a crowd of local activists.
“It shouldn’t take countless meetings, strategic organizing, and hours upon hours of your lives to get the city to respond to a basic safety need.”
For Deputy Mayor Kerson, the issue is personal.
“I grew up not far from here, on McGuinness and Meserole. I remember, as a kid, riding my bike around the block and doing a u-ey every time I approached McGuinness. I remember the Blockbuster down the road that I was never allowed to walk to because it was too dangerous. And I remember running away from home and not getting very far, because my parents would kill me for crossing McGuinness by myself.”
Flynn said the project is in the works, effective immediately, and should be completed within the next three months. He also told reporters that the DOT has not yet used the capital funding set aside by De Blasio, using in-house resources so far.
The full road diet implementation has been years in the making, facing delays and even an alleged bribery scheme. Street safety advocates called for infrastructure changes in 2021, after the tragic hit-and-run killing of teacher Matthew Jensen. Mayor Bill De Blasio pledged a revamp of the major thoroughfare.
The DOT spent two years collecting data and hosting local town halls before landing on a redesign in 2023. However, the Adams administration directed them to go back to the drawing board, ostensibly for more community feedback, but it later emerged that it was at the behest of Greenpoint’s largest landowners, Tony and Gina Argento of Broadway Stages, who allegedly paid a top Adams aide to kill the project.
The Adams administration eventually relented and allowed a truncated version of the redesign to move forward in 2024, not long after authorities subpoenaed Adams’ top aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, in connection with a different corruption case.
Lewis-Martin and the Argento family have pleaded not guilty to corruption and bribery charges.
Many at today’s press conference evoked the start of a new era, away from the cronyism and corruption that marked much of the Adams administration.
“No longer will we allow the whims of the few to come before the well-being of the many,” said Kerson.