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!
