The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 100 to 91
We were lucky enough to have the delightful Davis write for us a few years back, before he died, and the forthright godfather of Brownstone Brooklyn didn’t disappoint. One of the earliest to see the value of the borough’s now-totemic townhouses, rehabilitating a Boerum Hill building in 1965, Davis also had a keen eye for the self-aggrandizing myopia of his fellow “pioneers” and wrote an essential account of first-wave gentrification in his wonderful novel, A Meaningful Life (reissued in 2009 with an intro from Jonathan Lethem, a childhood friend of Davis’s son).