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In June the MTA implemented a drastic change to the G, eliminating 13 stops in Queens, including important transfer points. Having previously run to Forest Hills on nights and weekends, the Queens-bound G now terminates at Court Square in Long Island City. The MTA’s justification was that it rarely went to Forest Hills anyway: due to construction, it went beyond Court Square only three weekends in 2009. According to Elena Conte of the Pratt Center for Community Development, such cuts have a significant impact on low-income communities, which are increasingly reliant on buses. “What we find is that most people live and work in the same borough, and you’re not served by the trains if you’re traveling through the same borough,” she said.
“They did to the G what we thought they’d do,” says Mark Borino, former secretary of the North Brooklyn Greens, which was active in “Save the G” coalition efforts several years ago. “It’s all been borne out over the last few years. There was a lot of fear that in time they’d terminate the service permanently at Court Square,” he recalls. Save the G, however, has applauded the five-stop extension to Church Street, the southerly flipside of the Queens reductions. Beginning in July 2009, and lasting four years due to construction at Smith and 9th Street, the new Brooklyn terminus of the G is Church Avenue.
The last two years’ changes have brought the G to its present length of 21 stops, covering a limited but enormously varied distance—from the residential sections of Kensington and Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, Gowanus, and Red Hook, through Boerum Hill, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg, all the way to P.S. 1 in Long Island City. Listing out these neighborhoods, a certain “G” word comes to mind: it’s a virtual roll call of gentrification.
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