There's one stretch of road in Brooklyn that locals can barely mention without tripping or busting an axle: the Broadway corridor.
New York City’s most messed-up Broadway, which runs four miles from Williamsburg to East New York, is so pothole-scarred that cyclists in the know purposefully avoid it—no matter what Google Maps is telling them—and cars slow to a crawl to dodge the gaping holes. The road is a patchwork of cracked and crumbling concrete slabs, squishy black asphalt, and crevasses you could lose your shoes in.
For years, Brooklyn residents have been begging the City to fix this cursed roadway. In 2021, three local community boards even tried banding together to demand the Department of Transport finally repave the corridor. The issue has been on Community Board 4's capital budget request list for more than 30 years, its district manager said, but has been rebuffed from the Giuliani era to the Adams reign due to a lack of resources and funding. But now, as new Mayor Zohran Mamdani embraces being lord of the City's streets and the almighty filler-of-potholes, the community is finally seeing a glimmer of hope.
This week, local elected officials seized the moment. On Wednesday morning, Councilmembers Sandy Nurse and Chi Ossé joined Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for a rally on Broadway to demand that the NYC Department of Transportation finally restructure the corridor.
"With an administration that is embracing pothole politics, and just did a pothole blitz, we wanna see a blitz on Broadway," Nurse said, to cheers from community members. "So we just have one simple ask: We want DOT to fix Broadway. Now."
According to CrashMapper, more than 1,000 crash-related injuries have been recorded on the Broadway corridor in the last five years—that's more than one injury every two days. The City ranks it in the top 10 percent of the most dangerous streets in Brooklyn, according to a 2025 report.