« Albany's snooze button and business | Main | Flatbush Avenue freakout: How a race-baiting hoax hooked Bobo Brooklyn, briefly »
March 15, 2011
Writer Austin Ratner 'Jumps' Into Brooklyn Heights Beauty
NY Observer
by Matt Chaban
There goes the neighborhood?
Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, Simon Rich—Brooklyn Heights has long been home to some of New York's best-known writers. Now, America's oldest suburb can welcome Austin Ratner to its ranks.
A Johns Hopkins-trained doctor, Mr. Ratner has penned the textbook Concepts in Medical Physiology as well as the far less technical The Jump Artist, a novel about postwar photographer Philippe Halsman that has been praised by Harper's, among others. Yet it stands to reason that it is family connections as much as book royalties helping to pay for the stunning five-story home at 96 Joralemon Street. According to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Mr. Ratner is the stepson of James Ratner, who is an executive at Cleveland-based Forest City and cousin to Brooklyn macher Bruce Ratner.
NoLandGrab: The home apparently was not acquired through an eminent domain proceeding, so we wonder what portion of the $3,000,000 purchase price is attributable to public subsidies padding Forest City's bottom line?
Posted by eric at March 15, 2011 11:29 AM