Power. Webster’s Dictionary defines power as … No, no, no, never mind that: Power in New York City real estate means money—its acquisition, spending and creation—especially now, as the market enters a tremulous sunset after several bright, shiny years.

Our list of the 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate was assembled with this finance-centric criterion at the forefront. The list, especially higher up, contains those who animate the deals and the trends. They are the deciders and the money providers. They make the real estate world the rest of us live in; or cover, as the case may be.

This criterion explains why some people were obvious picks (financiers like No. 20 Josef Ackermann and No. 7 Lloyd Blankfein; developers like No. 1 Jerry Speyer and No. 9 Douglas Durst; landlords like No. 33 Bill Rudin and No. 66 Lloyd Goldman); and why some picks weren’t so obvious initially (No. 58 Charles Stevenson, the co-op board president at 740 Park; No. 26 Robert De Niro, perhaps the greatest living actor who became Tribeca’s greatest booster; No. 15 Edward Egan, the Catholic archbishop of New York with all that church property under his purview).

The criterion also helps explain why we didn’t rank any brokers until No. 25 Dolly Lenz, probably the most successful residential broker in the U.S. Why? However capable and ingenious in the commissioned service of those spending the capital, brokers are facilitators for the likes of Messrs. Durst and Speyer (or of Messrs. De Niro and Egan, for that matter). They are not the initiators.

The same holds for public officials, including the mighty Michael Bloomberg (No. 2). They seem to be at their best for real estate either facilitating its development or standing clear of its ascendancy. That is, obstructionist or helper; and Mr. Bloomberg’s administration has done very little of the former and a lot of the latter.

Finally, a few observations about the top 100.

It, like the upper echelons of New York real estate, was whiter than East Hampton’s, well, white pages: David Jackson (No. 50), the CEO of Istithmar, and Governor David Paterson (No. 13) were the only African-Americans on the list.

And Ms. Lenz, the broker, was the highest-ranking woman in private industry. She was joined by just eight other women.

Also, the list, as you might expect for one based on money and its management, was heavy on extreme wealth, even by New York standards, including both inherited (Kent Swig, Rob Speyer, Billy Macklowe, Donald Trump and Bill Rudin) and self-created (Mort Zuckerman, Joseph Moinian, Leonard Litwin and Larry Silverstein).

There were, however, a fair amount of almost-from-nothing entrepreneurs splashed across the list: Lockhart Steele, No. 91, publisher of the Curbed Network of blogs; Michael Shvo, No. 100, Manhattan luxury marketing in the meticulously tanned flesh; Craig Newmark, No. 6, that guy in glasses from San Francisco who has all the brokers frightened for their livelihoods; Keith McNally, No. 90, the hotel bellhop who became a restaurant deity; and on …

Who knows who’ll make it next year?

Jerry Speyer

Chairman and CEO of Tishman Speyer

Mr. Speyer may lack Donald Trump’s bluster, but the titan sealed the most expensive residential purchase in history ($5.4 billion for Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village); owns the MetLife and Chrysler buildings and Rockefeller Center; and very nearly won the right to develop the West Side rail yards.

 

Michael Bloomberg

More than any other lawmaker, Mr. Bloomberg sets the tone for development in New York City. In his six-plus years as mayor, he has boosted below-market-rate housing, opened up swaths of the waterfront to new construction, laid groundwork for development on the far West Side and pushed a series of mega-projects.

 

Stephen Ross

Mr. Ross may have lost the competition for the West Side rail yards, but the steadfast friend of Dan Doctoroff is still riding high, injecting $500 million into the Bronx Terminal Market, chairing REBNY and working with Vornado’s Steve Roth to resuscitate the Moynihan Station plan.

 

Marc Holliday

Mr. Holliday heads New York City’s largest commercial landlord, SL Green. The firm, with 67 properties scattered across New York and Connecticut, has recently made forays beyond its bread-and-butter portfolio of Class B buildings. Along with a minority Canadian partner, SL Green made the last giant building purchase of 2007, the $1.6 billion purchase of Citigroup’s 388-390 Greenwich Street downtown.

Amanda Burden

Any major land-use change in the city must pass over Ms. Burden’s desk—if it didn’t originate there in the first place. She has presided over 82 rezonings covering more than 6,100 blocks, and to date, she is the shining star of the Bloomberg administration’s still-incomplete development legacy.

 

Craig Newmark

The bald, bespectacled bus-taker doesn’t have the suaveness of shiny-shoed Manhattan real estate brokers, but he’ll conquer them all anyway. His site’s New York City housing listings—313,165 in April 2007 and then 567,883 in April 2008—often cuts out broker middlemen, which cuts out their chronic hype.

 

Lloyd Blankfein

Behind all the shrill chintz of real estate, there’s just the money, and a lot of it comes from a company led by a 53-year-old raised in Brooklyn public housing. But Mr. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs symbolizes something beyond epic funds: These lenders aren’t just kings, they’re the kingmakers.

 

Bruce Ratner

The leader of what is perhaps New York’s most high-profile development, the controversy magnet Atlantic Yards, Bruce Ratner is one of the most active developers in the city, often pursuing large, publicly administered projects. He’s recently taken a liking to famous architects, ensuring that his developments leave a notable impression on the skyline.

 

Douglas Durst

His Bank of America Tower is the most successful new office building in town, and it happens to be the most sustainable, too. Better yet, Mr. Durst has said green costs will be made back quickly.

Lee Bollinger

In a town where real estate is rarely measured in acres, Lee Bollinger is leading Columbia toward a 17-acre expansion, adding 6.8 million square feet to the campus. With the help of eminent domain, or at least the threat, he will be responsible for the wholesale transformation of West Harlem.

 

Michael Alfano

This onetime dean of N.Y.U.’s College of Dentistry now oversees the 15 million square feet leased and owned by the university, and is spearheading a plan to add six million feet of new space in the next 25 years. That’s no easy task, particularly in the notoriously prickly Village community.

 

James Dimon

Savior of Bear Stearns (and perhaps the American financial system?), Mr. Dimon’s firm has deep tentacles in the real estate industry in New York, whether as a lender or as a landlord: Many are waiting to see what becomes of Bear Stearns’ old headquarters at 383 Madison, a building valued at well over $1 billion.

 

David Paterson

If a New York City development project costs more than $1 billion, chances are it falls under the governor’s scope. To name a few that the state controls or administers: Moynihan Station, the World Trade Center, the Second Avenue Subway, Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn Bridge Park.

 

Mort Zuckerman

The Daily News publisher’s real estate firm owns over 5.5 million square feet of New York office space. It’s also developing one of the few new office skyscrapers: the planned 39-story tower at 250 West 55th Street.

 

 

 

Edward Egan

God has imbued Mr. Egan with more than just the power of the divine. Mr. Egan is estimated to control billions worth of New York real estate, including the priceless St. Patrick’s Cathedral, hundreds of parishes (96 in Manhattan alone), schools (including universities) and even hospitals.

 

Christine Quinn

For almost any new major development and zoning change in the city, the final stop is the City Council. The fate of billions of dollars’ worth of development will be determined by Ms. Quinn and the Council in just the coming months.

 

Arthur Zeckendorf

He decided to do a study on limestone, and now about 85,000 chunks of Indiana limestone, of the sort used to build the Empire State Building, make up 15 Central Park West. And thanks to that condo, developed by Mr. Zeckendorf and older brother William Lie, stony primness is in, sparkly glitz is out.

 

Miki Naftali

He fell in love with a ramshackle, money-losing Plaza Hotel, then Elad paid about $838,509 per room to buy it up. The redone Plaza, now more condo than hotel, has dozens of bubbly buyers who paid 10 times that amount for their suites—right before the market flattened.

 

Sheldon Solow

After hammering out a compromise with Councilman Daniel Garodnick, this billionaire won city approval to build seven cloud-busters just south of the United Nations. The $4 billion project also includes a public school, five acres of open space, a $10 million pedestrian bridge over F.D.R. Drive and ground-floor retail.

 

Josef Ackermann

Perhaps nothing encapsulates New York real estate’s animating power better than the relationship of Deutsche to Harry Macklowe. Mr. Macklowe took a $5.8 billion loan to help pay for his $7 billion purchase of seven Manhattan skyscrapers in February 2007. A year later, Mr. Macklowe couldn’t afford to pay back Deutsche. So the German bank took control of the buildings in a tentative deal.

 

Daniel Boyle

The future of this “city that never sleeps” rests with the former Syracuse cop, who has lent a more sympathetic ear to long-ignored local community boards, frustrating restaurateurs and bar operators citywide. There are plenty of hassles besides getting a liquor license—but just try paying rent without one.

 

Sheldon Silver

As one of the “three men in a room” in Albany, Sheldon Silver wields tremendous power over every piece of legislation and any budget that comes through the state house, and has quashed or delayed numerous development projects, including the West Side stadium and congestion pricing.

 

Steven Roth

The notoriously aggressive Steven Roth is on a quest to expand midtown’s thriving office district to the area around Penn Station, where he has all but bet the farm, owning 7.5 million square feet. All is connected with the chronically delayed redevelopment and expansion of Penn Station.

 

Danny Meyer

The restaurateur from St. Louis triggered the transformation of an entire neighborhood with the opening of his Union Square Café in 1985; the once-seedy area now teems with top-rated eateries. Expect the Upper West Side to become one big burger line when his Shake Shack opens on Columbus Avenue.

 

Dolly Lenz

This broker, nicknamed “Jaws” by Dennis Kozlowski, says she has made $748,319,000 in a single year, which would be four times higher than the second-biggest broker in America. She’s the killer whose ambition and contact list helped push Manhattan into its—waning?—era of eight-digit opulence.

 

Robert De Niro

Call it a Raging Bull Market downtown, with Travis Bickle in the driver’s seat, as the famous actor is planning another hotel to add to his burgeoning empire, which also includes Tribeca Film Center, Tribeca Cinemas, Tribeca Grill, Nobu and the new Greenwich Hotel.

 

Howard Rubenstein

In the early ’60s, fresh from Brooklyn, he brought a Manhattan real estate millionaire to an orphanage to sing, beginning a life of New York PR that’s scarily omnipresent (for example, he has done work for this newspaper). Now he spins for the real estate billionaires, not the millionaires.

 

Leonard Litwin

One of the few self-made billionaires on this list, Mr. Litwin, now in his 90s, built, literally, one of the city’s biggest apartment portfolios. It now includes the 45-story Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan and the Pavilion on the Upper East Side, which, when it went up in the 1960s, was the city’s biggest apartment tower.

 

Robert LiMandri

Mr. LiMandri took over in April from the embattled Patricia Lancaster, and has found himself on the proverbial hot seat amid concerns over a spike in construction worker deaths and general construction safety, following a March crane collapse in Turtle Bay, which killed seven.

Howard Lorber

Mr. Lorber, fond of lunches at Cipriani’s, heads the largest residential brokerage in the New York area, Prudential Douglas Elliman.

Steven Spinola

Mr. Spinola heads the daily operations of the industry’s (and the city’s) largest trade group. As REBNY’s head for the past 20 years, he’s become one of real estate’s biggest lobbyists in the corridors of government power.

 

Gary Barnett

This decade, Mr. Barnett’s firm has made quite the development splash, particularly with its Ariel East and West condos along Broadway in Morningside Heights.

 

Bill Rudin

Scion of one of the largest developers and landlords in New York’s history, Mr. Rudin is also one of the industry’s biggest philanthropists: He is chairman of the Association for a Better New York.

 

Ben Bernanke

In an age where Jay-Z flashes euros in MTV music videos, Mr. Bernanke, who controls the purse strings of banks, matters. Amid the subprime mortgage collapse that critics complain Mr. Bernanke should have foreseen, he lowered the federal funds rate and engineered the JPMorgan bailout of Bear Stearns.

 

Darcy Stacom

Ms. Stacom, who in 2002 left archrival Cushman & Wakefield, where her father and sister worked, has forged a reputation as one of the city’s top investment-sales brokers. Her biggest prize: negotiating for landlord MetLife, along with colleague Bill Shanahan, the largest real estate deal in modern history, the $5.4 billion sale of Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village.

Stephen Siegel

Mr. Siegel runs the worldwide brokerage operations of the New York-based commercial firm. But, locally, he knows just about every deal and dealmaker in greater Gotham.

 

Pam Liebman

Ms. Liebman runs one of the two largest residential brokerages in the New York area, taking the reins from founder Barbara Corcoran earlier this decade. Corcoran routinely produces some of the city’s top-grossing brokers.

 

Donald Trump

Even if he tends to sell his name to buildings instead of actually owning them outright, his stamp on the cityscape can’t be denied. You behold his mark every day in the brashness of real estate marketing, the ubiquity of chintz, or the gigantism of trophy condos.

 

Billy Macklowe

Mr. Macklowe must now pinch-hit for his father, Harry, owner—for now—of the GM Building and several other Manhattan skyscrapers. The family firm faces billions in debt, its eventual success or failure under Macklowe fils the barometer for where the entire commercial market’s headed.

 

Shaun Donovan

Mr. Donovan, as head of the nation’s largest municipal housing agency, is charged with implementing Mayor Bloomberg’s $7.5 billion initiative to build 165,000 affordable units for 500,000 New Yorkers in a 10-year period. He’s also implementing the much-ballyhooed 421-a reforms, which start this summer.

 

Tino Hernandez

Mr. Hernandez manages the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side, where he lived in his youth, in addition to the 342 other public housing developments citywide. That’s 180,000 apartments housing more than 400,000 New Yorkers.

 

Kent Swig

Harry Macklowe’s son-in-law oversees $3 billion in properties, with interests in virtually every sector of the industry: developing, brokering, managing, you name it. Now he’s building a hotel in the Financial District. Maybe others: “Downtown has the highest tourist-traffic outside of Times Square … it’s only going to get a lot more.”

 

 

James Cooper

Trinity Church, through royal decree in 1705, has come to own most of Hudson Square—six million square feet of commercial space in 18 buildings. The buildings have over the past couple of years drawn a heady roster: Newsweek, New York, The New York Review of Books, WNYC, Viacom, CBS Radio.

 

Robert B. Tierney

If he decides a building here is worth keeping, an owner’s chance to demolish and rebuild is wrecked. Tom Wolfe has written that Mr. Tierney lacks the power or pluck to stand up to developers, but this January the commissioner told Aby Rosen to “rethink” his Madison Avenue tower plans.

 

Ian Schrager

The former Studio 54 impresario revolutionized the hotel industry with his stylish Morgans Hotel in 1984, setting a new standard for design that continues to influence developers nationwide. Now, even Marriott is joining the “boutique” bandwagon, partnering with Mr. Schrager on a new hip hotel chain.

 

Elliot ‘Lee’ Sander

Mr. Sander has extraordinary ambitions for the M.T.A. that would ease commutes and boost access: the Second Avenue Subway, an LIRR terminal by Grand Central and the completion of the Fulton Street Transit Center, to name a few. His challenge: finding the billions needed to do it when money is in short supply.

 

 

Hall Willkie

The Kentucky-born Mr. Willkie heads one of the city’s premiere luxury residential brokerages, with 350 brokers doing somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion worth of home sales a year.

 

 

Dottie Herman

She stormed in from Long Island in 2003, along with partner Howard Lorber, to take control of Douglas Elliman, one of the city’s most venerated residential brokerages. Since then, Ms. Herman has grown it exponentially, to over 3,300 brokers, working from the East End to the West Side.

 

Barry Gosin

Michael Bloomberg’s former tenant rep is now leading a massive search for new digs for legal giant Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

 

David Jackson

Mr. Jackson, head of the Dubai-based Istithmar, has snapped up Barneys and Loehmann’s in his effort to capitalize on New York City’s growing income stratification. It’s cynical. And brilliant. Istithmar and Istithmar Real Estate have spent no less than $7 billion in New York since ’05.

 

Frank Gehry

If Bruce Ratner is right, and his 16-skyscraper-and-arena Atlantic Yards project comes to fruition, Mr. Gehry, its designer, will alter Brooklyn’s aesthetic as we know it. If, however, it continues to stumble … Well, just ask the Municipal Arts Society, which recently put out some ugly renderings to that effect.

 

Albert Behler

Backed with German financing, Mr. Behler’s Paramount Group was one of the most active traders of buildings last year, even after the credit crunch. He bought 31 West 52nd Street, sold 1177 Avenue of the Americas and One Financial Square, and was said to be close to buying 650 Madison Avenue.

 

Joseph Moinian

The Persian tycoon claims to have developed more property downtown than any other private landowner—at least until the Freedom Tower is finished—and is busy with the area’s first major hotel project: the 57-story W Downtown Hotel & Residences, opening in 2009.

Charles Schumer

The Senate’s third-highest-ranking Democrat, Mr. Schumer plays an integral role in bringing funding for key initiatives, as he did so successfully for Lower Manhattan. And just this week, he charted a course for West Side land-use policy, one that would be at odds with the city’s strategy.

 

Robert J. Ivanhoe

There isn’t a secret coterie of cackling lawyers controlling New York, which would be cool, but at least there are huge figures like Mr. Ivanhoe, who helped usher in the $5.4 billion Stuy Town deal, the $675 million Plaza purchase, and apparently the largest U.S. residential construction loan ever, for Larry Silverstein.

 

Larry Silverstein

Just two months before Sept. 11, Mr. Silverstein signed a 99-year lease for the World Trade Center. Bad timing. Yet since 2001, he’s completed 7 World Trade Center, begun construction of the Freedom Tower and has even bid on at least one of Harry Macklowe’s old Equity properties.

 

Adrian Benepe

More than one-seventh of the city is controlled by the agency that Mr. Benepe has led since the start of the Bloomberg administration. He is overseeing a major parks expansion, and new projects like Manhattan’s High Line are spawning nearby development and hiking land values.

 

Charles P. Stevenson Jr.

The bronze doors to 740 Park are worth 10 bronzed trophy wives, and he’s the gatekeeper. His predecessor, Donald Rynne, told him to keep the co-op Christian, which didn’t happen, but, like its neighbors, 740 Park is still massively white. If that changed, its peers just might follow suit, too.

Michael Fascitelli

The top deputy to Steve Roth, Mr. Fascitelli has run Vornado for more than 10 years now and helped expand its presence dramatically within the city limits. It’s now one of the biggest landlords in the Penn Station area and a co-developer, along with Stephen Ross’ Related, of Moynihan Station.

 

Frank Bruni

Tho ugh more feared than any other reviewer, Mr. Bruni is not the restaurant grim reaper: “It’s not my goal … to put a restaurant out of business.” But it happens. Just ask Alain Ducasse. Or Tim Love. Or their landlords.

 

Avi Schick

Supporters like Shelly Silver call him competent, hardworking and effective. Critics call him a steamroller. Either way, he’s overseeing billions of dollars of economic development projects, including Moynihan Station, Atlantic Yards, the West Side rail yards, the Javits Center, and ground zero.

 

André Balazs

The handsome hotelier behind the Mercer and Chateau Marmont is developing what some consider the most unusual and significant New York building in years: the High Line-straddling Standard New York, a 300-room hotel on stilts that Curbed likened to the four-legged war machines from The Empire Strikes Back.

 

Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs didn’t invent the West Village, but his five stores there have made it into a precious, pricey, overpopulated, well-corduroyed, bubble-skirted dreamland. There’s a store for men, one for women, two for accessories and one for noun-named children.

 

Richard LeFrak

Third-generation king of one of New York’s most durable real estate dynasties, Mr. LeFrak’s firm owns more than 5,000 apartments locally (most in LeFrak City in Queens) and millions more square feet of office space nationwide.

 

Christopher Ward

Governor Paterson’s new pick to head the bistate empire of an agency that is the Port Authority, Mr. Ward will oversee well over $10 billion in new construction, including the overbudget tangle at ground zero.

 

Lloyd Goldman

His late uncle, Sol Goldman, was the city’s largest private landlord by the mid-1980s. Nephew Lloyd has kept the family dynasty going the past 20-odd years with his landlord and building-management firm, which owns hundreds of buildings throughout the city.

 

Bruce Mosler

Mr. Mosler heads a commercial brokerage that annually competes with archrival CB Richard Ellis for the distinction of brokering the most deals in the city. Its biggest triumph so far? Brokering the largest building sale in U.S. history, $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, in late 2006.

 

Jonathan Mechanic

The Fried Frank holiday party every winter always draws a who’s who of New York real estate. And a tremendous reason for that is the aptly named Mr. Mechanic, who helps engineer deals for major clients, including the embattled Harry Macklowe.

 

Rob Speyer

As president of the mega-developer and landlord (Chrysler Building, Stuyvesant Town, Rockefeller Center, etc.), Mr. Speyer runs the daily business of the firm chaired by dad Jerry.

 

Ed Ott

Mr. Ott has thrown the Central Labor Council’s hat into two of the city’s largest residential real estate deals in recent years: Stuyvesant Town and the attempted purchase of Starrett City. Now he faces off with the Bloomberg administration over Willets Point in an attempt to wrest concessions.

 

Peter Riguardi

Upon his arrival at its helm in 2002, Mr. Riguardi began a revamp of the Jones Lang LaSalle New York office. It now does formidable battle with heavyweights Cushman & Wakefield and CB Richard Ellis.

 

Scott Latham

A struggling artist turned nationally renowned commercial real estate broker—not many can claim the biography of Cushman’s Scott Latham. He and his team, often dubbed “the Fantastic Four,” routinely broker the city’s top deals, including its biggest-ever building sale, the $1.8 billion trade of 666 Fifth Avenue.

 

Veronica Hackett

Ms. Hackett stands as a female developer in a New York universe inhabited by alpha males. Her firm has developed condos like Sky House and 200 West End Avenue as well as office buildings like the 24-story 180 Madison Avenue.

 

Robert Futterman

Adidas, the Gap, Old Navy, Polo Ralph Lauren, H&M, Barnes & Noble, J. Crew, Bed Bath & Beyond—just a few of the clients that retail brokerage founder Mr. Futterman claims.

 

Bill Goss

The real estate coverage, which Mr. Goss has been in charge of since 2006, commands a lot of attention from voyeurs, consumers and—perhaps most importantly—advertisers. And The Times’ expanded regional and national reporting has not gone unnoticed by its local competitors.

 

Dennis De Quatro

Since closing down Chelsea’s embattled Sessa nightclub in 2004, the city’s top quality-of-life cop has turned his attention to “nuisance” properties in the boozy East Village—shuttering a fake-ID mill and a video store-cum-brothel, among other places—proving that rent inflation isn’t the only vehicle of downtown gentrification.

 

Norman Oder

The Park Slope-based Norman Oder runs a one-man, one-topic journalistic operation that brings a constant stream of mostly critical articles on Atlantic Yards. His presence appears to have propelled attention and criticism of the project now 17 months since approval.

 

David Childs

Mr. Childs designed the Freedom Tower, Sheldon Solow’s city on the East River, and the Moynihan Station plan. His vision for modernist architecture will, within the coming decades, define the aesthetic of our landscape.

 

James Abadie

He’s in charge of the general contracting firm that New York Construction News this year ranked the highest-grossing in the tristate area, with revenue of $2,671,900,000. In that role, Mr. Abadie oversees several projects—including such headaches as the Deutsche Bank building demolition and Trump Soho.

 

Richard Lipsky

To many large developers, particularly those who build big-box retail, Mr. Lipsky is a pain in the ass. He organizes public opposition and pitches to the media a constant David vs. Goliath story line, usually with small retailers, threatened by the Vornados and the Related Companies of the world, playing the David role.

 

Paula Del Nunzio

Unlike Dolly Lenz, she doesn’t appear in BlackBerry ads or on Fox News, but Ms. Del Nunzio has helped turn uptown mansions into commodities worth more than the G.D.P. of some nations. She set a $40 million townhouse record in 2006, but broke that with a still-reigning $53 million sale.

 

Thomas Frieden

The epidemiologist has presided over the most massive reactionary crackdown on city restaurants in years, shuttering some 200 locations in six weeks after an embarrassing video showed rats overrunning a recently inspected eatery.

 

Jesse Masyr

A key party in some of the city’s largest development deals, Mr. Masyr, attorney for the Related Companies, is currently the lead private-sector negotiator in talks for the future of Coney Island.

 

Tom Colicchio

Danny Meyer’s former partner at Gramercy Tavern continues to expand his own culinary empire to 15 locations, with separate ’Wichcraft kiosks opening soon in Herald Square and Greeley Square.

 

Nicolai Ouroussoff

The great champion of New York starchitecture happens to not like the term, which he calls a portmanteau for the “churlish.” His love for name-brand architecture is nearly ceaseless (in March he called big-designer condos “gorgeous tokens” of New York vanity), and it’s also captivating.

 

Marvin Markus

Sometimes decried as a “stooge for the landlords,” the man in charge of regulating monthly rates for one million apartments citywide is actually an equal-opportunity offender. Turns out property owners didn’t think much of the latest round of rent hikes, either.

 

Jonathan Miller

His huge market reports for Elliman can stir up exhilaration or dread about the state of the city, the kind of thing that makes or breaks a bubble. Plus, his firm did $5 billion in Manhattan evaluations last year, which means there’s a relatively good chance he’s appraised you.

 

Andrew Berman

Building anything new in Greenwich Village can be an extraordinarily trying, if not impossible, experience today, in large part due to the well-organized resistance of Mr. Berman.

 

Richard Brodsky

The loudest legislative critic of New York City’s approach to mega-projects, Richard Brodsky of Westchester takes seriously his role as chairman of the committee that oversees the state’s development agency. He was the most visible opponent of congestion pricing in Albany.

 

 

 

Keith McNally

From Odeon to Pastis to Schiller’s Liquor Bar, the former bellhop turned eatery titan is often at the forefront of a neighborhood’s renaissance. Now, the Balthazaar boss is aiming to revive Greenwich Village’s ancient Minetta Tavern.

 

Lockhart Steele

Armed with a reported $1.5 million in financing, the ubiquitous blogger, who changed the way New Yorkers gossip about what’s going on (and up) in their neighborhoods, is now extending the sewing circle to more cities. First up: Chicago. Then, who knows? “Curbed Tallahassee’s not launching next month or anything like that,” he said.

 

David Levinson

Mr. Levinson, formerly of CB Richard Ellis, left in 2005 to found L&L. The firm now owns and manages a five-million-square-foot portfolio that includes 142 West 57th Street and 195 Broadway in the Financial District, to which Mr. Levinson recently lured Omnicom Group.

 

Joseph Sitt

Having snapped up land in Coney Island’s amusement district, he’s got the city—and its plan to turn that land into a modern-day Vegas on the Atlantic—under his thumb. Or maybe the city, wielding the threat of rezoning said location into parkland, has him under its thumb. Either way.

 

Joe Chan

Mr. Chan, once a chief adviser to former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, has been working the Brooklyn development beat since ’06. His mission? To transform the beleaguered nabe into a commercial and residential boomtown.

 

Melissa Cohn

Last year, Ms. Cohn brokered $1,129,126,981 in loans, which makes her, as usual, America’s heftiest mortgage broker. Even in an economy jeopardized by shaky mortgage deals, business is crisp: She just brokered her biggest loan ever, a $23 million monster for a massive Central Park condo.

 

Steve Cuozzo

The Andy Rooney of New York’s real estate and restaurant worlds is perhaps the foremost expert on how bad food can bring down an entire neighborhood.

 

 

Giuseppe Cipriani

The svelte Harry’s Bar scion oversees Manhattan’s most preeminent restaurant empire, with posh eateries and banquet halls in every elite neighborhood. His Venetian armor has withstood attacks from politicians, unions, landlords; now, the state wants to nix his liquor licenses. Bet on the bulletproof bald guy.

 

Sam Chang

The recent credit crunch may have curbed his appetite for construction, but the city’s most prolific hotel developer—“We’re probably at about 40,” he said in December—still buys and sells with dizzying frequency, unloading more than $190 million in property in February and March alone.

David Yassky

The self-appointed progressive conscious of the City Council, Mr. Yassky helped spearhead the fight for inclusionary zoning along the Williamsburg waterfront (a practice since implemented elsewhere). The super-wonk also pushed super hard on increasing the exclusionary zone for 421-a tax benefits.

 

Michael Shvo

Mr. Shvo changed the way developers sell New York luxury. The marketing mind behind residential projects like Bryant Park Tower, W New York-Downtown and 20 Pine the Collection has worked with the likes of Philippe Starck, Giorgio Armani and Jade Jagger.

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