Marcus's stake in the project goes a bit beyond the professional. Since 1972, he's lived in a handsome brownstone in Fort Greene. It was a great house in a great neighborhood -- a real neighborhood, as anyone with a Brooklyn soul would stress -- but in terms of good restaurants and cineplexes, he might as well been living in the wilds of, well, Gowanus.

"Brooklyn is probably the most underserved movie market in the country. It is now seen as a goldmine by people like Sony," Marcus says. Brooklyn, long the victim of middle-class flight, had been essentially redlined by the huge national chains that took over American retailing in the fifties and sixties. "But now, this is where the grass is greener," says Marcus.

"The one factor that cannot be overstated is the reduction of crime," Marcus says. "It stabilizes the economy. People are now willing to make investments in places like Brooklyn, to commit their lives there. Loews can put up a big movie theater, confident that it's a place people will want to go to. If you tried this even five years ago, you would have been bombarded with questions about gangs and things."

And so commercial development is now feeding the residential market, which in turn is feeding more commercial development. And it may come as a surprise to some Manhattan snobs, but many are there by choice. "Increasingly, Brooklyn is not an alternative but a preference," says Melinda Magnett, Barbara Corcoran's partner in Brooklyn. "Prices all over the borough have gone up, most predominantly in what we call historic 'brownstone' Brooklyn, which are the areas closest to the city. The large Pathmark superstore and MetroTech have had a dramatic effect on Fort Greene?Clinton Hill. We're listing one house in Fort Greene for more than $700,000. Last year, we had the highest-priced sale ever in Cobble Hill, $1.5 million. That was unheard of."

Values in established colonies of affluence continue to spike. Last year, residential properties in Park Slope rose 15 percent, and three-bedroom apartments, for example, shot up 25 percent. The homesteading continues, spreading into once-dodgy terrain like Boerum Hill.

"It's just like how, years ago, people wouldn't go below Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, and then they wouldn't go below Sixth Avenue," Magnett says. "In the same way, people wouldn't cross that Court Street line into Boerum Hill. That's no longer the case. In 1997, the average single-family in Boerum Hill sold for $249,300. By the end of '98, that same house was selling for $369,000. The larger houses are now selling in the sixes and sevens."

Mary Goodson-Roe, who does voice-overs for television ads, recently moved back to New York with her husband, Bob Roe, a top editor at Sports Illustrated, after years in Los Angeles. One day, weary from looking at overpriced, cramped apartments in Manhattan, she took a break and wandered into ABC Carpet: "A saleswoman there said she had just moved out to Park Slope and she had never been happier. She said, 'Here's the name of my Realtor. He's great.' I had another appointment uptown, so I got on the subway. The woman sitting next to me had a pad out, and it looked like she was drawing a kitchen. I asked her if she had just moved. The exact same words came out of her mouth: 'My husband and I just moved out to Park Slope and we've never been happier. We've got the greatest Realtor and his name is . . .' And it was the exact same Realtor. Two strangers within half an hour. It was like The Stepford Wives."