And the big-chain successes, like Atlantic Center's bustling Old Navy outlet, are starting to beget more big chains. Home Depot is already a hit, nestled alongside the BQE on the Carroll Gardens-Red Hook border; other national chains such as Costco and Staples are planning new Brooklyn outposts.

But the current Brooklyn building boom is more than just a spasm of predictable mallification; some of the most ambitious plans have a deliciously counterintuitive flavor. Millennium Partners, the development giant responsible for the huge Sony theater complex at Lincoln Square, is about to start construction on the $65 million, 22-screen Brooklyn Commons multiplex -- the biggest in New York. It will offer a vast, glass-roofed galleria featuring chain restaurants and stores, right in the middle of the post-industrial wasteland known as Gowanus, named for the canal that effectively cuts off Carroll Gardens from Park Slope.

That other post-industrial wasteland, the long-shuttered Brooklyn Navy Yard, is now being resuscitated in fits and starts as a twenty-first-century industrial park. Two would-be Jack Warners -- set designer Cary Dean Hart, 36, and his Internet-whiz cohort, Louis Madigan, 30 -- are raising money for a fifteen-acre movie lot competitive with those in Culver City and Burbank.

"It's going to be an incredible economic catalyst for Brooklyn," says Hart. "They shot Meet Joe Black in the Park Slope Armory. Over that four or five months, the local hardware store there did a quarter-million dollars of business from that shoot alone."

What is important about all of these projects is not just that lawyers living on Prospect Park West will no longer need to cross the river to buy their CDs. It's that suddenly, people are dreaming big in Brooklyn again, for the first time in 50 years. "I think they're finally getting over the Brooklyn Dodgers syndrome," laughs Kenneth Jackson, the Columbia history professor who edited The Encyclopedia of New York City. "You know, 'Everything that was good ended in 1957.' "

One might call this sudden flurry of ambition the second wave of the Brooklyn Renaissance. The first wave was the brownstone revolution, when upwardly mobile Manhattanites poured over the river and snatched up lovely Victorian townhouses at Filene's Basement prices. Now, 30 years after that torrent of gentrification began, the rest of the borough is finally growing up around it. Or put it another way: In the first wave, the middle class came back. In the second wave, the capital did.

"The 'brownstone revolution,' if you want to call it that, was a process of creating value," says Jed Marcus, Millennium's point man at the Brooklyn Commons complex, which also may still include a Chelsea Piers-like indoor sports facility. "People saw these beautiful neighborhoods with great architecture that were well located and said, 'I'm going to move here, and it's just going to go up in value.' By now, though, the value in housing has generally been recognized. But these new commercial projects are now going to create value in these totally untapped retail markets."