Greenpoint residents and elected representatives voiced their ire Tuesday over an MTA proposal that would suspend service to the neighborhood on the G train for nine weekends over the summer.
“The G train is the lifeline for our community,” Councilmember Lincoln Restler, a Democrat whose district includes Greenpoint, told reporters on Tuesday. “This is the one train that we have to get in and out of our neighborhood.”
Restler and others who represent Kings County’s northernmost neighborhood say there were briefed by the MTA on plans to shut down service between the Bedford-Nostrand Ave. Station and the Court Square Station for three weekends in June, two weekends in August, one weekend in September and three weekends in December.
The MTA hasn’t formally announced when the outages will take place — a source at the transit agency told the Daily News the dates shared with officials are still proposals, and not yet set in stone.
But MTA officials say the work is a necessity, as crews working on signal improvements have discovered water leaking into the Greenpoint Tube — the tunnel that brings the G train under the Newtown Creek.
“It turns out that tunnel under Newtown Creek between Greenpoint and Long Island City needs a lot more work than was originally thought,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber told reporters Tuesday.
“That’s the reason why we are having to do extra weekend shutdowns,” he said. “This is the reality of the generations of neglect of the MTA’s core infrastructure.”
People in Greenpoint, Brooklyn rally against proposed G train subway shutdowns on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. (John McCarten / NYC Council Media Unit)
But for the residents and business-owners, the possibility of another set of G train outage evoked frustration after two years of service suspensions while crews worked to upgrade the signaling system on the Crosstown Line.
Portions of the line were shut down for ten weeks during the summer of 2024, and the section of the line north of the Bedford-Nostrand Station faced summer shutdowns again last year.
The signal upgrade work is still ongoing — the MTA recently advised riders to expect service disruptions during weeknight service on the G for the next two weeks while resignaling work continues.
“Every single year, the MTA is doing track work in the summer — every single weekend,” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said to reporters Tuesday outside the Nassau Ave. station in Greenpoint.
Restler expressed concern over the impact a third summer of service disruptions would have on local businesses.
“When G train is shut down, nobody comes to Greenpoint,” the councilmember said. “They just won’t make the trip — they’re not getting on a shuttle bus that’s going to be stuck in traffic, that runs too infrequently, that’s not a reliable way to get around.”
People in Greenpoint, Brooklyn rally against proposed G train subway shutdowns on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. (John McCarten / NYC Council Media Unit)
Rachel Despeaux, owner of Awoke Vintage, a clothing store with two neighborhood storefronts, said the MTA was treating her “as a noone and a nothing.”
“If you have retail in New York, you know that you’re so lucky to break even on the weekdays and to actually make money on the weekends.”
“We have already weathered the storm of a ten-week shutdown from the MTA,” she said. “And we were promised that that was going to be the end of it, assured that our businesses were a priority and that’s why this work was being done.”
“That, obviously, was not the case,” she added.
Mami Cho-Oyagi, a Greenpoint resident who relies on the train to get to work in Bedford-Stuyvesant, found out about the proposed outages as she was exiting the station at Nassau Ave.
“How are we going to live?” she asked “Can we live by bus? No.”
“It’s going to affect our lives greatly,” she said.