The 100 Greatest Brooklynites: 50 to 41
Bow was born during a heat wave in the Prospect Heights tenement in which she would also be raised. She would go on to become the ultimate flapper, the Jazz Age’s most prominent sex symbol. In 1927, at the age of 22, she starred in a film called It; thereafter, she was known as The It Girl, and the English language got a new phrase. Betty Boop was partially inspired by her, as was the female lead in The Artist. Sometimes, a star’s iconography can so pervade the culture that we forget there was actually once a real person from whom we got all those signifiers.