Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York took aim at another piece of his predecessor’s legacy on Saturday, vowing to complete a pedestrian-focused redesign of a Brooklyn thoroughfare that was improbably swept up in a corruption scandal last year.
City planners and local residents had worked for years to redesign a roughly one-mile stretch of McGuinness Boulevard in the Greenpoint neighborhood, hoping to add protected bike lanes and install pedestrian safety measures after a series of fatalities along the roadway.
But after the redesign began in 2023, the administration of Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, abruptly switched course, throwing its support behind a revised plan for the northern section of the road that critics called watered down and insufficient.
In August, the Manhattan district attorney charged Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a top aide to Mr. Adams, with conspiring to kill the original proposal, in exchange for a relatively small sum of money and a speaking role on a television series from the owners of a local soundstage company that opposed the changes. Ms. Lewis-Martin pleaded not guilty, as did the production company’s owners, Gina and Anthony Argento, who were also charged.
On Saturday, Mr. Mamdani, surrounded by supporters with signs bearing the names of people who have been killed in crashes on the boulevard, said he would finish the original, full plan for the roadway as soon as weather permitted, and that he would not be “bowed by big-money interests.”
“What was understood solely as a road, became something much larger,” Mr. Mamdani said in an apparent reference to Ms. Lewis-Martin’s corruption charges, before addressing the transit advocates who pushed for the redesign.
“Thanks to so many who went out and pounded the pavement, that pavement now will change,” he said.
Ms. Lewis-Martin, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case against her, said in a text message that hundreds of community members opposed the original redesign, and that support for the project was artificially inflated.
“If you want a comment and the real story, go to the community,” she said, adding: “I only did my job!”
A spokesman for the Argentos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The announcement, on his third day as mayor, came as Mr. Mamdani was speeding to signal a sharp change in direction from the Adams administration.
Since taking the oath of office on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani has inserted the city into a legal dispute between a major landlord and tenants accusing it of dangerous neglect and created a new agency led by a democratic socialist ally, the Office of Mass Engagement, that aims to change the way New Yorkers interact with city government.
Mr. Mamdani canceled executive orders from Mr. Adams that had barred city agencies from boycotting Israel and defined some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. And on Friday, he vowed to broaden the selection criteria for some city judges to include more public defenders and lawyers representing indigent clients.
Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, a democratic socialist who represents the neighborhood around McGuinness Boulevard, has spent years fighting for the pedestrian overhaul, including when she lived near the thoroughfare before entering elected office.
She said in an interview that Mr. Mamdani was sending a clear early signal about whose voices would have sway in his decision making.
“This is going to be an administration that upholds promises to community members that participate in feedback sessions and participatory government and is not going to kowtow to wealthy business owners and wealthy donors to the Democratic Party,” she said.
A push to redesign the boulevard gained momentum in 2021, after Matthew Jensen, a local elementary-school teacher, was killed by a speeding driver while crossing the street. He was the third person to be killed in a crash on the roadway in 10 years, according to the city’s Transportation Department.
After local organizers pressed for safety improvements, the department in 2023 began work on the southern portion of the boulevard, removing a lane of vehicular traffic on each side — dropping the total number of lanes down to two from four — to accommodate bike lanes protected from traffic and new pedestrian safety measures. The roadway, which connects Brooklyn and Queens, serves more than 4,000 daily bike riders during the summer months, according to the mayor’s office.
But in 2024, partly to address some residents’ concerns that the reduced lanes would snarl traffic or divert it to side streets, the Transportation Department selected a revised plan for the remaining roadway, choosing to allow four lanes of car traffic during peak travel times. The plan left portions of bike lanes without permanent barriers and limited the potential for some pedestrian safety measures.
“People treat it like a highway,” said Meryl LaBorde, a local resident and member of the Make McGuinness Safe campaign. The group favored the so-called road diet approach, a repurposing of one car lane in each direction to make the road safer for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers that has already been completed on the southern stretch of the boulevard.
Lincoln Restler, a City Council member who has supported the original redesign, said that a review of traffic data along the boulevard where the full suite of changes had already been made showed that congestion had gotten only marginally worse, while pedestrian safety had markedly improved.
Several transit advocates cheered the announcement, in part because Michael Flynn, the city’s newly appointed transportation commissioner, had signaled that he would soon tackle other street redesign projects.
Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a safe-streets advocacy group, said the move, especially so soon in Mr. Mamdani’s term, was promising.
“The parents and families of Greenpoint can breathe a sigh of relief, and we’re really looking forward to seeing the same spirit brought to other stalled projects across the city,” he said.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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