The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 90 to 81
Born in Brooklyn and a graduate of Erasmus, Sills would go on to become one of the greatest sopranos of her generation and its leading interpreter of Donizetti heroines. Not content merely to retire as a star, she reinvented herself as a civic-minded philanthropist, serving on the boards of New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center, helping guide all those institutions from the 80s well into the aughts; one of her final acts before dying of lung cancer in 2007 was to help appoint the increasingly controversial Peter Gelb as the head of the Met; thus does her administrative legacy endure like her musical one.