The city just broke ground on a Greenpoint street redesign that should have been finished years ago. The reason it was not, prosecutors say, is that a powerful local film-studio family paid to stall it, which makes this groundbreaking less about a bike lane than about who city streets get designed for.
On May 27 the Department of Transportation began work to complete the long-delayed McGuinness Boulevard redesign, extending the bike lane along a corridor where a teacher was killed crossing the street. DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn framed it as resuming a safety project that had been set aside, what the administration casts as the undoing of political interference, and Deputy Mayor Julia Kerson cast finishing it as a repudiation of special-interest influence over city policy.
The interference is not a metaphor. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Broadway Stages co-owners Gina and Anthony Argento with paying a top Adams aide to alter the McGuinness plan. That aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, was indicted for accepting more than $75,000 in bribes across several schemes, with the Argentos allegedly providing a bank transfer, catering for a Gracie Mansion event, and more, in exchange for watering down the redesign that would have taken a traffic lane near their Greenpoint studios.
The redesign exists because someone died. The safety push began after a public-school teacher, Matthew Jensen, was killed in a 2021 hit-and-run crossing McGuinness. So the timeline is stark: a teacher is killed, the city plans a fix, a studio dynasty allegedly buys a slowdown, and only now, with the aide under indictment, does the concrete actually get poured.
That is why the administration is staging the groundbreaking as a statement. Finishing McGuinness is a way of saying, on a specific street with a specific body count, that a redesign backed by a clear safety case does not get to be quietly killed by a $75,000 favor. The road diet removes a travel lane in each direction and adds a parking lane and a bike lane.
The criminal case against Lewis-Martin and the Argentos is still moving through the courts, and the charges are allegations until proven. For Greenpoint, the concrete is the resolution that matters; the DOT’s project page tracks the construction timeline, and the boulevard that took a death and a bribery indictment to fix is finally being built the way the safety data said it should be.
Featured image: Public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons
