New Yorker Profiles Markowitz

April 21st, 2005

This week’s issue of the New Yorker features Rebecca Mead’s profile of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. The story deals at length with “the man, the plan, the arena.” I reported on Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards proposal (see The Arena and Atlantic Avenue, 3/4/05) last summer for a lengthy Columbia project.

Some gems from the story:

- If you know Markowitz only as the rolly-polly guy who can seem to be at five Brooklyn street fairs at once, this article is enlightening.

- In the middle of a conversation with The New Yorker, Markowitz receives a phone call from the elusive developer Bruce Rather. It’s an awkward call.

- The last graf of the Rebecca Mead’s story is truly wonderful:

Mitchell-Lama was the state’s effort to create housing specifically for low- and middle-income residents, and more than a hundred and five thousand apartments were built before construction under the program ended in the late nineteen-seventies. A nostalgia for that aspect of Brooklyn’s past was not, though, one in which Marty Markowitz, for all his egg-cream soliloquizing, could afford to indulge, and the car drove on.