Category:Famous People from New York City
New York City enters these biographies in two ways: as a birthplace, and as the place people moved to in order to do the work they became known for. The roster here leans toward the trades the city concentrates, money management and federal law above all, and it carries a broadcast and reality-television layer that no other place category on this wiki holds. Running underneath both is a bench of research scientists and mathematicians, several of them Nobel laureates, who were born in the outer boroughs and did their defining work in laboratories somewhere else.
Background
New York City is a single municipality made up of five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, consolidated in 1898. Four industries account for most of the working lives collected here. The first is finance: the New York Stock Exchange, the money-center banks, and the hedge fund and private equity firms clustered in Midtown and Greenwich. The second is federal law, through the United States Attorney's offices and district courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, which have supplied the country with attorneys general, FBI directors and Supreme Court justices. The third is broadcast and print media, since the news divisions of the major television networks and most of American book and magazine publishing are headquartered in the city. The fourth is entertainment, from Broadway through stand-up comedy to hip hop.
The scope of this category is wider than the city limits in one respect worth stating plainly. Several members are associated with New York State rather than New York City specifically, particularly nineteenth-century jurists who came up through the state judiciary in Albany, Utica and the Hudson Valley before reaching Washington. Where the distinction matters, it is drawn below.
Notable members
Finance is the deepest single seam. J.P. Morgan dominated American corporate finance and industrial consolidation in the decades either side of 1900, and John D. Rockefeller co-founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. The modern generation is a roll call of firm founders: Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, Julian Robertson at Tiger Management, Israel Englander at Millennium Management, Steve Cohen at Point72, Bill Ackman at Pershing Square, Seth Klarman at the Baupost Group, Jim Chanos at Kynikos Associates, Boaz Weinstein at Saba Capital, Dan Sundheim at D1 Capital and Mario Gabelli at Gabelli Asset Management. Carl Icahn built and controls Icahn Enterprises. Rob Kapito co-founded BlackRock and has been its president since the firm started. Jerome Kohlberg Jr. helped construct the modern leveraged buyout, and Scott Nuttall now serves as co-chief executive of KKR. Jamie Dimon has chaired JPMorgan Chase since 2006; Lloyd Blankfein and David Solomon have each led Goldman Sachs. Ken Langone financed the creation of Home Depot alongside Arthur Blank.
The oddest entry in that group is also the most instructive. Anne Scheiber worked twenty-three years as an auditor at the Internal Revenue Service, never earned more than $4,000 a year and was never promoted, and turned a $5,000 stake into roughly $22 million over five decades of dividend investing before leaving it to charity.
Federal law and economic policy form the second cluster. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, raised in Brooklyn, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Benjamin N. Cardozo all sat on the Supreme Court. Eric Holder, Michael Mukasey, William Barr and Ramsey Clark served as United States Attorney General; James Comey, Robert Mueller and Kash Patel have directed the FBI. On the economic side, Alan Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, and Janet Yellen, Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Steven Mnuchin and Henry Morgenthau Jr. have run the Treasury or the Fed between them. Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Robert Solow, Paul Krugman, Claudia Goldin, Robert Fogel, Peter Diamond, Eric Maskin, Michael Kremer and Alvin Roth carry Nobel Prizes in economics.
The science bench is unusually strong for a city category, and almost none of it stayed in New York. Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger shared the 1965 physics prize for quantum electrodynamics, Roy Glauber took the quantum theory of optical coherence, Martin Perl the tau lepton, and Russell Hulse a binary pulsar found with his doctoral advisor. Arthur Ashkin, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants, spent his entire career at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and invented optical tweezers there. In chemistry and medicine the roster holds Arthur Kornberg, Irwin Rose, Paul Greengard, Richard Axel, Roger Tsien, Louis Brus, David Julius, John Fenn, Harvey J. Alter, William Kaelin Jr., Robert Lefkowitz, Gregg Semenza and Louis Ignarro. Jesse Douglas solved Plateau's problem and was one of the two first recipients of the Fields Medal in 1936. J. Robert Oppenheimer directed Los Alamos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has run the Hayden Planetarium since 1996.
Politics runs from the founding to the present day. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay built their careers in the city; Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump are the two presidents here. City Hall is represented by Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, Eric Adams and Zohran Mamdani. In Congress the roster includes Shirley Chisholm, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Hakeem Jeffries, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres, with Letitia James as state attorney general.
Culture is concentrated in comedy, musical theatre and hip hop rather than in film. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Aaron Sorkin write for the stage and screen; Christopher Walken, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Chevy Chase, Kristen Wiig and Anne Hathaway act; Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips direct; John Williams composes. Jay-Z and Rakim came out of the city's hip hop scene, and Mariah Carey out of its pop industry. Richard Avedon, born in the city in 1923, and Mathew Brady, who opened his studio there in 1844, bracket a century of American photography. Fred Wilson, born in the Bronx, works in installation and found objects on how museums frame race and history.
New York on the Supreme Court
Few place categories on this wiki carry a judicial cluster this dense, and its shape is specific. The modern members are city-raised: Benjamin N. Cardozo chaired the New York Court of Appeals before his 1932 appointment, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor followed from Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.
The nineteenth-century members reached the Court by a different route, through the state rather than the city. Smith Thompson came from Amenia in the Hudson Valley and served as Secretary of the Navy before his 1823 appointment. Samuel Nelson, born in the hamlet of Hebron, rose through the state judiciary and sat for nearly three decades. Ward Hunt was mayor of Utica before Ulysses S. Grant appointed him in 1873, and Rufus Wheeler Peckham came from an Albany legal family by way of the New York Court of Appeals. Samuel Blatchford made his name in admiralty and patent law, and Henry Brockholst Livingston, a Continental Army officer from the Livingston family, was seated in 1807. Charles Evans Hughes governed the state, left the Court to run for president, returned as Chief Justice, and served as Secretary of State in between.
The television layer
The distinguishing feature of this roster against every other city category is how much of it is television, and specifically Bravo. Bethenny Frankel, Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan, Jill Zarin, Carole Radziwill, Aviva Drescher and Leah McSweeney belong to the original run of The Real Housewives of New York City, which began in 2008. The franchise was relaunched in 2023 with an entirely new ensemble, and that cohort is here too: Erin Lichy, Jessel Taank, Brynn Whitfield, Ubah Hassan, Racquel Chevremont and Sai De Silva. Several arrived with careers that predate the camera. Radziwill spent sixteen years at ABC News and holds three Emmy Awards, a Peabody and a GLAAD Media Award. McSweeney founded the streetwear label Married to the Mob in 2004. Chevremont curates contemporary art and advises private collectors.
News and sport broadcasting sit alongside it. Anderson Cooper has anchored his CNN hour since 2003, Maggie Haberman covers the White House for The New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joanna Stern cover business and technology, and Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Mike Greenberg, Doris Burke, Rich Eisen and Stephen A. Smith call and analyse games.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.