The G train is about to disappear from chunks of north Brooklyn all June, and the people who run Greenpoint and Williamsburg’s bars, restaurants and shops have a blunt message for the MTA: this round of shutdowns could put some of them out of business.
Fifty-five owners along the line signed a letter to the MTA board this spring asking the agency to move its planned weekend closures to weeknight overnights instead, amNewYork reported. Their case is specific. In Greenpoint, the G is the neighborhood’s only subway line, and the worst of the closures fall in June and December, the two months they can least afford to lose. “These vital months encompass some of the busiest weeks of the year for our businesses,” the owners wrote, naming “NYC Pride, the World Cup, and Christmas.” Their bottom line: “We all want better-performing trains and understand the necessity of this work, but this progress cannot come at the cost of our livelihoods.”
They are not sold on the replacement buses, either. The neighborhood’s buses already “frequently run with 30-minute headways even on weekdays,” the letter said, and the shuttle service the MTA is offering “ranges from surprisingly fast to slower than walking.”
MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber’s answer was, more or less, no. “Overnights are really of limited value, because by the time you set up and you take the work down, you have a really short time period to get the work done, and it’s disruptive,” Lieber said, per amNewYork. “We have to take weekends to do some of this work.” The agency moved exactly one weekend, pushing a planned June 12 to 15 closure to July 10 to 13. The rest is going ahead.
Here is what riders are actually facing. The first weekend closure runs June 5 to 8, from 9:45 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday, when signal-modernization work cuts the G between Bedford-Nostrand Avenue and Court Square. Trains run every 10 minutes during the day and evening between Church Avenue and Bedford-Nostrand Avenue, which becomes the temporary last stop, while free shuttle buses cover the closed stretch and connect to the F at 21st Street-Queensbridge in Queens.
A week of weeknight work follows, June 15 to 19, Monday through Friday from 9:45 p.m. to 5 a.m., when structural maintenance again severs the G between Bedford-Nostrand and Court Square, with free T403 shuttle buses on the gap. Then the second weekend, June 19 to 22, repeats the first, except the reason is track replacement rather than signals.
That is on top of what already landed. Over Memorial Day weekend, May 29 to June 1, the G ran only between Court Square and Bedford-Nostrand while crews installed ADA elevators at Classon Avenue, and the overnight of June 1 into June 2 knocked out the G between Hoyt-Schermerhorn and Church Avenue for more signal work. The F is the G’s stand-in through most of these closures.
The work itself is real and overdue. The MTA says the weekend suspensions are needed to repair the G train tunnel under Newtown Creek that links Brooklyn and Queens, keep modernizing the line’s signals, and install 5G service in the tunnels. The Classon Avenue elevators are a separate accessibility project.
None of that lands easy on a Greenpoint coffee shop trying to make June rent. The owners asked for weeknights and got a single rescheduled weekend; the MTA gets its modern signals and its repaired tunnel. The question hanging over the neighborhood all summer is which of those 55 storefronts are still open to see the work pay off.
Want to do something with that anger? You can read the businesses’ full letter to the MTA and see which storefronts signed it through Greenpointers and amNewYork. And before you plan a single weekend around the G this summer, check the MTA’s live service status at new.mta.info, because these dates have already moved once.
Featured image: IliketrainsR211T / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
