Category:Famous People from Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, an independent city until its consolidation into New York in 1898, and for most of the twentieth century a landscape of tenements, public housing projects and immigrant neighborhoods. Read the biographies in this category together and one pattern dominates the rest: a striking share of the members began in Brooklyn public housing or in a working-class immigrant household and ended up running a federal department, a Fortune 500 company or a record label. The category also holds an unusually large share of New York's sitting congressional delegation, and a distinct cluster of Bravo reality television cast members whose Brooklyn origins were part of their on-screen identity.
Brooklyn in Washington
Few American neighborhoods have supplied as much of one state's federal delegation. Chuck Schumer was born in 1950 and grew up in Flatbush, attending Brooklyn public schools. Hakeem Jeffries was born in 1970 and raised in Crown Heights, and represents a district anchored in the borough. Jerrold Nadler was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and has represented parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn for more than three decades. Nydia Velázquez entered public office through a Brooklyn seat on the New York City Council in 1984, at a point when the borough's Hispanic community was pressing for representation, and later won a district drawn across Brooklyn, Queens and the Lower East Side. Letitia James was born in the city in 1958 and raised in Brooklyn, represented Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant on the City Council, and became Attorney General of New York. Shirley Chisholm preceded all of them, winning a Bedford-Stuyvesant seat in 1968 as the first Black woman elected to Congress and serving seven terms.
Two members carried Brooklyn into offices well outside New York. Bernie Sanders was born in Flatbush in 1941 to a working-class Jewish family, started at Brooklyn College, and became the longest-serving independent in congressional history representing Vermont. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933 to a furrier and grew up in Flatbush, graduating from James Madison High School the day after her mother died. Janet Yellen was raised in Bay Ridge before running the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.
Out of the projects
The economic origin story repeats with unusual consistency. Jay-Z grew up in the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the street life of those years supplies the narrative material of his first album. Howard Schultz grew up in the Bayview Housing Projects in Canarsie and has described his father's work as a blue-collar laborer without health insurance as the formative fact of his career. Lloyd Blankfein lived in public housing in East New York and Brownsville before Harvard, commodities trading and Goldman Sachs, and titled his memoir after that distance. Jimmy Iovine was the son of a Red Hook longshoreman before he became a recording engineer and co-founded Interscope Records. David Geffen grew up in Borough Park, finished high school in Brooklyn, and left for California without a degree.
The scientific membership follows the same shape. Arthur Kornberg was born in 1918 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School at fifteen. Irwin Rose was born in 1926 and attended P.S. 134 through the Depression before his family left the borough in 1939. Louis Ignarro was the son of an Italian immigrant carpenter and dated his interest in science to a chemistry set he was given at ten. Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn in 1924, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family, and went on to show that technological progress rather than capital accumulation drives long-run growth. Arthur Ashkin and Anthony Fauci complete the science side of the roster.
Real estate and corporate leadership are represented by Samuel J. LeFrak, who inherited a Brooklyn construction business from his father and expanded it across the metropolitan area, Terry Semel, who was raised in a middle-class Jewish family in the borough before running Warner Bros. and then Yahoo, and Devin Wenig, who grew up in Flatbush before leading eBay.
Screen, stage and reality television
Adam Sandler was born in Brooklyn in 1966 and got into theater at Erasmus Hall High School. Anne Hathaway was born in the borough in 1982. Al Michaels was born there in 1944 and has called play-by-play for five decades. Carla Gallo and Angela Paton round out the screen actors.
Bravo's franchises drew repeatedly on the same borough, and the connection was usually explicit on screen. Alex McCord and her husband made their choice to live in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan a running theme of The Real Housewives of New York City. Caroline Manzo and Dina Manzo were both born Laurita in Brooklyn before The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Nicole Napolitano is identified with the borough in the same franchise. Elyse Slaine has described her route from a Brooklyn upbringing to the Upper East Side as the arc that made her interesting to viewers. Racquel Chevremont was born in Brooklyn in 1971 and curated an exhibition at Pioneer Works in Red Hook in 2021.
See also
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