Hipster Highway Hellzone

‘It’s well known that it is a dangerous place,’ said grieving mom Rachel McCulloch, whose hipster son, 28-year-old Neil Chamberlain, was killed during an early morning hit and run on McGuinness in April 2010.

Note to the Daily News – it’s not just hipsters who are losing their lives on McGuinness Boulevard. And Chamberlain’s mother is right – McGuinness Boulevard is a well-known accident waiting to happen. Since 1995, this 15-block, 4-lane “boulevard” has seen over 100 pedestrians or cyclists run over by motor vehicles1. 11 of those pedestrians lost their lives (almost half of them were 60 years old or older), as did 3 cyclists. As best as I can tell, only 2 of these 14 fatalities involved “hipsters”.

For the record, here is a partial list of the people who have lost their lives trying to cross the “hipster hellzone”:

Richard Iwaszkiewicz – 61, a baker was hit in April 1995
In 1996 an unidentified woman, aged 60 was killed
Joseph LoCurto, a construction worker on the McGuinness Boulevard renovation project was killed in December, 1998
In 2002, an unidentified male pedestrian in his 30s was killed
Liz Byrne, aged 45 was killed in September 2005
Maria Piatkiewicz, 67, a neighborhood resident was run over by a van in July 2008
Solange Raulston, a 33-year-old DJ was killed while riding her bicycle in December 2009
Neil Chamberlain a 28-year-old web designer was killed on his bike in April 2010

The thing is, McGuinness Boulevard has been a hell zone for years now. Write an article about that, and skip the gratuitous “hipster” headlines.

1 The data here was compiled from Crashstat.org, which has information through 2009 only; the names of the victims were compiled through Google searches and searches of local newspapers, like the Daily News.