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October 20, 2008
Brooklyn's Top 50 Most Influential No. 41 - 50
Brownstoner
Every day this week, we're going to count down Brooklyn's Top 50* most influential people in shaping Brooklyn neighborhoods — by building new structures, preserving older ones, influencing property values and quality of life, speaking for thousands, or changing the course of developments, for example. Instead of listing everyone from Bloomberg to Bernanke, we mostly stuck with locals. Surprisingly still, by broadening our definition of influence beyond quantitative factors like real estate holdings and constituency, the toughest task was keeping the list down to only 50 (*so we cheated, there's actually more like 65 people on the list, and it was still hard). Ranking them in order was also tough, so please take the whole exercise with a grain of salt and sense of humor. In some cases we considered the type of entity the person represents, the potential impact of the project he or she is working on, and the extent of influence over time, distance and the number of Brooklynites affected. By all means, feel free to give us your two cents in the comments section. By the end of this week, we could have 200 people on the list!
...50. Developer Bruce Ratner's choice of legendary starchitect Frank Gehry to design Atlantic Yards helped galvanize support for the massive project, versus if he had chosen a blander designer, as stunning architecture can have an elevating effect on a community. But Gehry's vision has also been hotly criticized as offensive to the surrounding brownstone neighborhoods. No matter, Atlantic Yards hasn't been built yet, and Gehry was recently ousted from BAM's Theater for a New Audience design team. If he ever does get something built here, he'll be in the top 20 for sure.
Posted by eric at October 20, 2008 11:31 AM