Hey, we know this guy. He showed us some apartments in 1991. Really nice guy. Gald to see this profile in The Real Deal by Alison Gregor.

When residential broker Jerry Minsky made Fort Greene his stomping ground two decades ago, he was well aware that he was confronting a bit of family history.

His parents, Nathan and Rose Minsky, both Holocaust survivors, were moved into the neighborhood’s housing projects in 1948 — and departed a year later.

"They were immigrants, like from ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ and they thought, ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’" said Minsky, an agent in the Fort Greene office of the Corcoran Group. "So, when I bought my house here in 1989, they were like, ‘Interesting choice of community.’"

Though he was born on the Lower East Side and grew up in the Brighton Beach area, Minsky didn’t let his parents’ uncertainty about his choice of neighborhoods derail his career in real estate.

After purchasing a 19th-century townhouse that was a former rectory for $350,000 (now worth almost six times that amount, he claims), Minsky went on to carve out a successful career as a broker and is today regarded as one of the major power players in Brooklyn residential real estate. Last year, Minsky and his assistant, Erin Brennan, moved more than $30 million worth of properties in the Fort Greene neighborhood.

"That means we had to do a lot of volume," Minsky said. "This is not a neighborhood where one deal is $10 million. We had over 100 transactions."

The pace of real estate deals in Fort Greene is not necessarily surprising given the high quality of properties in the historically middle-class African-American neighborhood, called the most preserved in Brooklyn. Statuesque five-story townhouses line many of its blocks; Fort Greene Park is undergoing a rejuvenation; and the neighborhood’s public transportation options could hardly be better.

But two decades ago, when Minsky bought into the neighborhood, Fort Greene, like some other parts of Brooklyn, was plagued with crime and drug problems. Still, Minsky saw an Old World charm to the community.

"I always had a real respect for history and a love of old architecture," he said. "Maybe this neighborhood evoked some fantasy about my European background, since I grew up in Mitchell-Lama apartment dwellings in the 1960s."

During his tenure as a teacher of disabled children in Williamsburg, Minsky attended a party held in 1984 at the Fort Greene apartment of a colleague — and it changed his life. At the same time, he was wooing his future wife, Aida, who is of Puerto Rican descent. The couple soon found an apartment in Fort Greene.

"I fell in love with a neighborhood," Minsky said. "I left teaching, and I became a broker, and that was it. I’ve been a top producer ever since."