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Meet the 'King of Greenpoint,' Who Brought Neighborhood the G Train

By Gwynne Hogan | November 30, 2016 9:52am
 Peter J. McGuinness, "the King of Greenpoint" according to a new biography fought to get the train line.
Peter J. McGuinness
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GREENPOINT — He put the "G" in Greenpoint.

It's hard to imagine what the neighborhood would be without its loved and loathed G train, which has linked Brooklyn to Queens since the 1930s.

But if weren't for Peter J. McGuinness, a local politician and power broker during the '20s, '30s and '40s, planners would have mapped the line much farther east through Bushwick and into Maspeth, according to history teacher and neighborhood resident Geoffry Cobb, whose new book "The King of Greenpoint" hit neighborhood shelves this fall.

"Why is Greenpoint Siberia?" McGuinness said in a booming tenor during a speech that persuaded city planners to divert the line north into Greenpoint in 1927, according to Cobb.

In addition to getting Greenpoint the G train, McGuinness lobbied for other major infrastructure improvements for his neighborhood like America Playground, Newtown Barge Park and McCarren Park Pool, Cobb said.

Rough and tumble, McGuinness was one of 14 children and an amateur boxer who never made it past the eighth grade. Despite his humble beginnings, he traded his gloves for a spot in local city government at age 31, when he got fed up corrupt politicians, Cobb said. 

He worked his way up the ranks from alderman (what's now city councilman) to Sheriff of Brooklyn, to other borough-wide positions, though he always pulled strings for Greenpoint, and he never lost his working-class edge.

As an alderman, for example, he punched out five teens who set off a firework in a baby's bassinet and was applauded for it, according to Cobb.

Cobb researched his latest book by combing Brooklyn College's archive, which has 7 cubic feet of scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about McGuinness, he said.

While McGuinness is remembered as a staunch defender of working-class Greenpointers, he didn't take kindly to gypsies or Chinese immigrants, who he rounded up and bussed out in order to keep factory jobs for the area's Irish, Polish and Italian residents, Cobb said. 

"Now we find that deplorable," said Cobb, admitting McGuinness' tactics echoed campaign promises from President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he will increase deportations, consider the creation of a database of Muslims living in the U.S. and build a wall along the Mexico border. 

"There's a lot of comparisons to Trump, there definitely are."

There are other poignant lessons that McGuinness' story can tell us about politics today, like how he managed to work with politicians whom he disagreed with to get real improvements for the neighborhood, according to Cobb.

You can get your copy online or at Word Bookstores at 126 Franklin St. for $17. Cobb will read passages from his book on Jan. 17 at Word in Greenpoint.