Ms. Pfoser Darby has a long history of incendiary remarks, but her bike comments have ignited a local media firestorm and helped inflame an already contentious plan to create the bike lanes as part of a safety redesign of a dangerous stretch of street near Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

In her decades of public service, Ms. Pfoser Darby, 82, has seen this pocket of Queens change from a largely white enclave to a neighborhood with a mostly foreign-born population of Hispanics and Asians — and where by 2015, the white population had dwindled to less than 7 percent.

In some places, perhaps, Ms. Pfoser Darby’s insensitive comments would go unchallenged, or even endorsed. But in Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the United States, her views, especially on undocumented immigrants — her preferred term is “illegals” — have earned her a reputation that lies somewhere between outright racism and a territorial aloofness reminiscent of Archie Bunker, the aging bigot of Queens, in the sitcom “All in the Family.”

At a time of growing concern over intolerance and as American neighborhoods become more diverse, Ms. Pfoser Darby’s story might serve as a lens into the fraught dynamics at play as immigrants change the complexion of many parts of the country.

Her remarks about undocumented immigrants and bike lanes have elicited calls for her removal from the board. Among other things, Ms. Pfoser Darby has said that once President Trump deports the undocumented immigrants from Corona, there will be no need for bike lanes.