Construction finally shuddered to a halt late Thursday on the final leg of National Grid’s pipeline project in North Brooklyn. The city’s thirst for building, building, building had kept construction workers of all stripes among the few professions not sent home amidst the COVID-19 pandemic but that no longer appears to be the case at the site of a project that has drawn the increased ire of local residents in recent months. 

The shut down came only a day before Gov. Andrew Cuomo would order construction projects, city-wide, to close down.   

But as late as Thursday morning, little had changed at the North Williamsburg site of National Grid’s Metropolitan Reliability Project. The company’s response to calls by both activists and local lawmakers to shutter construction had been defiant. Little green signs reading: ESSENTIAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT and SAFE WORK ZONE had been installed in front of one of the sites, Kim Fraczek, director of the Sane Energy Project, told Bushwick Daily.