For Emily Gallagher, McGuinness Boulevard has been a long road

The controversial McGuinness Boulevard street safety redesign has made a return to the news lately as an indictment against Ingrid Lewis-Martin, formerly a senior adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and Tony and Gina Argento, owners of Brooklyn film studio Broadway Stages, was unsealed Aug. 21, along with three others implicating Lewis-Martin. The indictment alleges that the Argentos gave Lewis-Martin $2,500, catering services with 10,000 and an appearance on the Hulu show “Godfather of Harlem” in exchange for her help shutting down the major Greenpoint, Brooklyn, project. (Lewis-Martin and the Argentos have all pleaded not guilty.) The indictment has reinvigorated efforts to make the project a reality. Assembly Member Emily Gallagher has advocated for safety improvements to McGuinness Boulevard for more than a decade. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How would you summarize the situation with McGuinness Boulevard?

If you were to ask me, “Why did I become an elected official?” it is because of McGuinness Boulevard. It is an incredibly busy road, but it is not busy with local traffic. It was built by Robert Moses for trucking and to be a shortcut. It used to be a normal-sized road before the 1950s called Oakland Avenue. They cleared all of these people’s houses to build it – it was a quote unquote ‘slum clearance.’ But it took away a huge part of our community, and it has been used traditionally as a way for people to make a shortcut between the (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) and the Long Island Expressway … and then still treat McGuinness Boulevard like they’re on 278 and go, like, 70, 80 miles an hour, or attempt to, and it literally cuts through the heart of Greenpoint. 

Greenpoint and Williamsburg had the BQE ripped through it, as well, because these neighborhoods were not regarded as important, because they were working-class neighborhoods of ethnic people, and they were low-income immigrant communities for most of their existence. Greenpoint was Irish and Polish, and Dominican; Williamsburg was Dominican and Puerto Rican. And they’re just, basically, like, “We don’t really care what happens to these communities. We care about white people being able to get in and out of the city quickly.” … I moved on to McGuinness Boulevard in 2006, and I witnessed a number of crashes, and some of them were really grisly. … There was not one person (in the neighborhood) who was like, “McGuinness is fine.” And whenever you talked to somebody, they would be like, “Oh, you’re never going to be able to change that.” It was just really a defeated kind of position. Because what we’ve learned through research is that, since it was built in the 1950s, community members have been trying to change McGuinness Boulevard and make it less dangerous. And nobody’s listened. … I started working in earnest on this in 2012 and I’ve been intermittently picking this up as an activist. … I had become kind of a hobbyist in this topic, and I had read all these studies and books, and I was like, “I know that the only way to do this is to redesign the road – why won’t they do that?” So that became an exploratory question for me. 

So here we are.

So here we are! And in 2021, it was the end of de Blasio’s term, and I was a brand new elected official, and I was actually trying to get money to complete Bushwick Inlet Park. … I was talking to my chief of staff, and he was like, “Why don’t we call Bill de Blasio and leave him a message and talk to him about Bushwick Inlet Park and ask him for funding?” And then I got a call from a PS 110 parent who was furious because her children, who were very little, had this beloved teacher, Matthew Jensen, who had just been killed. … She was like, “What are you going to do?” And I just laughed and was like, “I’ve been trying to fix this road forever.” And I said to her, “It’s going to take a movement to fix this road.” … So then, when I called Bill de Blasio … I left him a voicemail about Bushwick Inlet Park, and then I said, “And also, if you have any more Vision Zero money, we have this incredibly dangerous road that would be an amazing legacy for you to fix, because nobody’s fixed it in 50 years.” And he called me back, and he was like, “I would like to give you money for McGuinness Boulevard.” … I had no expectations – I’ve already become cynical as an activist, and then he pledged $39 million. I remember, I think I fell down. I at least started crying, because I just didn’t expect anybody to take this seriously. 

PS 110 parents had gotten every single parent to come to this rally, and they were ready to fight, and another local activist … they teamed up together to form Make McGuinness Safe, and they started doing their own independent research about, what could a road design look like? And they created a vision that they brought to the (New York City Department of Transportation), and then, DOT, behind the scenes … they were saying to me, “It is absolutely crazy that you think we can fix this road.” … And I was like, “You know what, all I can do is die with my boots on, you know?” And so I was like, “Let’s try.” So we did two years of community surveys, and I said to them at the beginning, “I know everyone’s going to come at us at the end and say that we didn’t talk to the right people. So I want to do this exhaustively.” … We did every single effing thing that we could to get all the feedback possible. … And they were saying in summer 2023, “We’re going to do this.” 

My personal feeling is that the writers strike started, so there was this big wall in the film and television industry, because they couldn’t film anything. And I feel like when work slows down or stops, you start, like, walking around, trying to figure out what you can spend your energy on. I think that’s what caused people to get so interested in crushing our plan.

When the McGuinness Boulevard redesign project was essentially killed, did you guys suspect that Ingrid Lewis-Martin had been involved in that? 

We had suspicions, because we knew that City Hall was starting to have (a role). In the earlier days, we would have meetings just with DOT. We had so many meetings with them, and our community is very united. … We were all on board. Then DOT tells us that now we have to have a representative from City Hall in our meeting, and we’re like, “Why?” And they were like, “That’s just how Eric Adams wants it now.” And we’re like, “There’s something really fishy about this.” We knew that they were close, and we also had some precedent, because having been on the community board and been a street safety advocate, I had watched the Argentos use their influence to kill the Greenpoint Avenue bike lane. … There was a street safety plan for Monitor Street. There was a street safety plan for Kingsland Avenue. And, one by one, if you talk to Broadway Stages, they would say, “We don’t want that.” And all of a sudden it wouldn’t happen. … And Broadway Stages has always been extremely generous with their wealth to the community, to the point where a lot of community stakeholders would live in fear of not getting assistance from the Argentos. … In a way, the business was standing in for what government should have been doing.

When the corruption indictment against Lewis-Martin and Tony and Gina Argento was unsealed, what was your reaction? Were you surprised at all?

I felt vindicated, because I saw the writing on the wall. … (But also) I was really disappointed, because despite the kind of fiefdom situation I just described, Tony and Gina have been in this community for a really long time, and they have done really amazing things. They are community-minded, but the way that it operates should not take over government authority. That’s oligarchy. So I felt vindicated, disappointed, but also, it was nice, because I felt like DOT had been in this chokehold of having to lie for the administration. I thought that was really disgusting. 

What do you guys do now?

Now that this is clarified, I know Make McGuinness Safe has been meeting with all mayoral candidates and getting them to sign a pledge that they will finish the original design – the original data-driven, community-backed design that was approved by the majority of constituents to be implemented. … What people need to understand is that this isn’t about cyclists, per se. Cyclists are in it, but when you redesign a road to be more narrow, the reaction in drivers is to drive more cautiously. When there are multiple lanes, people are thinking about how to get around each other, how to speed and how to beat light. When there’s one lane, it makes people more cautious, and it makes people make better choices as drivers, and it shortens the length of the pedestrian crossing. … So people, when they see a bike lane, they’re like, “Oh, you’re doing this for cyclists.” And they start to connect all this stuff to gentrification, which is a straw man argument. The reality is, it makes drivers, pedestrians and cyclists behave differently. … It is not because we want bikes to be the predominant way – even though that is better for the Earth. It is so that all users have equal access to the road in a safe manner.