The Observer's Doree Shafrir profiled Mr. Ross in 2007, describing his book, The Rest Is Noise, as follows :

The MacArthur Foundation cited Mr. Ross for "offering both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future."

The fiction writer Chimamanda Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun, was also named a fellow.

Ross:

Classical music keeps getting marginalized in American culture, and, like the nerd standing against the wall at the cool kids' party, it's always making awkward attempts to strike up a conversation. Either that or it holds itself aloof ("Who wants to go to that stupid party when we can stay home and play Risk?"). Classical snobbery and classical populism may be two sides of the same coin—the melancholy sense of not belonging. But that can also be a kind of freedom.

Ratcliff:

Can we talk some truth about concert audiences? I know so many people who are at least casual enthusiasts of jazz—many of them among that huge bloc of amateur jazz musicians—who don't go out anymore to see whoever's new. I used to think it's because jazz has become too thoughtful for its own good, but I am coming to think that it doesn't have to do with jazz at all. It probably doesn't have to do with expensive tickets, either. (A movie with popcorn and a soda costs only a little less than a set at the Village Vanguard.) People just don't go out to hear music anymore, the way they used to even 15 years ago. It's too much of a hassle. Maybe they read 75 recommendations for what to do in the New Yorker and 75 more in the Times, and they just say, fuck it, I can't decide. And so the audience issue that Coltrane dealt with—was his late music somehow breaking a contract with his fans? Was it too harsh? Is he allowed to do this?—is now completely moot. To exaggerate a little bit, everything's permitted, and nobody's listening.

Ross:

I wonder, though, how deep this crisis goes. The Music—jazz or classical—may have fallen from a great height. Then again, aren't audiences for the Music collectively bigger than they were 50 years ago—especially when you factor in Europe and East Asia? Across the oceans, the concertgoing habit seems more ingrained. I'm told that teenagers and twentysomethings show up in large numbers for orchestra concerts in Japan, where classical music holds a healthy 15 percent market share. I sometimes see hip young Japanese tourists at the Philharmonic, looking a bit confused, as if thinking to themselves, "Why are we the only young people here?" The crisis seems to be particularly, peculiarly American—though it may spread.

Ratcliff:

I have been brought up with the idea that subcultures are sexy as hell, and subcultures are pretty much engineered to keep older people out, right? They gather late at night … they don't advertise very well … they're great for just as long as you don't know about it. I like to see commitment however I can get it. Death-metal shows, raves, tiny jazz clubs, whatever. Doesn't even have to be teenagers. There's a subculture for Czech polka in Nebraska, and it's a subculture of 65- to 80-year-olds.

Perhaps his long-standing efforts at classifying music stood him in good stead during the research for his first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which goes on sale Tuesday. The culmination of 10 years’ worth of work, Noise is a rereading of the conventional wisdom about 20th-century classical music: that avant-garde, atonal music was the important music of the century and that in some ways all modern classical music is derived from it. This argument is near-heretical for many scholars of classical music, but what Mr. Ross is really asking for is a complete reorientation of how classical music is appreciated: as part of culture as a whole, not a hermetically sealed world unto itself.

It stands to reason, then, that in the New Yorker Mr. Ross has written articles about Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Thomas Mann and the phenomenon of “concert rage”—when audience members get unnecessarily angry about rustling, sneezing, and throat-clearing during a concert—among other subjects. (On his blog, which shares his book’s name, Mr. Ross also keeps top 10 lists, divided into what he calls “preponderantly notational”—that is, classical—and “preponderantly non-notational”; albums in the latter group from 2006 included such artists as Justin Timberlake, Kelis and Joanna Newsom.)

He characterizes his writing as somewhere between “pure, objective, ‘did the soprano sing slightly flat?’ kind of criticism, and something more like music appreciation or writing with a slightly educational aspect to it.”

“The whole point,” he explained over a late dinner at the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue in Chelsea, is “to not be too in-your-face or condescending.”

That would also be an apt way to describe the 39-year-old Mr. Ross. Slightly built, Mr. Ross was wearing a light blue shirt and black jeans, comfortable black shoes and a wedding ring on his right hand, in the European style. (He met his husband, actor and director Jonathan Lisecki, in a bar seven years ago; they got married last year in Canada.) He speaks softly and deliberately, but smiles easily and gets animated when discussing his interests—which, beyond classical music, include Orson Welles, running along the West Side Highway and his two cats, Penelope and Maulina (so named because she’s an Egyptian Mau). Penelope, he said, sometimes acts like a dog, and sometimes like a bird.

MR. ROSS BENEFITED FROM SOME important mentoring and guidance early in his career. After graduating from Harvard, where he studied with the composer Peter Lieberson and was the D.J. of a classical music show on student radio station WHRB, Ross started writing freelance reviews for Fanfare, a classical music magazine, which paid him $2 for each review. “I never pictured writing about music as a career,” he said, and so he also applied to graduate programs in English around that time. “I wanted to combine literature and music,” he said. “I would have ended up writing my dissertation on [Richard Strauss’s opera] Salome, I think. So some of that research ended up in my book.” Today, he owns 13 recordings of Salome.

Eventually, Mr. Ross says, he got a piece in The New Republic, where literary editor Leon Wieseltier “kind of decided I should become a music critic.” Wieselter helped Mr. Ross get hired by The New York Times in 1992 as a 24-year-old stringer, writing about classical music for the culture desk. He was paid $80 for each piece (and people complain about The Times’ stinginess today!). “Of course, I was only paying $675 a month in rent,” he said.

While at The Times, Mr. Ross got his first piece in The New Yorker. “Louis Menand and Adam Gopnik were culture editors at the time, and they had been reading my pieces in The Times,” he explained. “I wrote one piece a year for four years”—including the obituary for Kurt Cobain, because the magazine didn’t have a popular music critic on staff. He was hired as the magazine’s classical music critic in 1996.

In 2004, Mr. Ross wrote a controversial piece for The New Yorker called “Listen to This” that it’s probably not a stretch to call his manifesto: “For at least a century, [classical] music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.” Those may seem like harsh words from someone who writes about classical music, but the essay is really a billet-doux that traces Mr. Ross’s own evolution as a classical music lover, including how his perspective on the genre changed as a college student discovering Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu: “I abandoned the notion of classical superiority, which led to a crisis of faith: if the music wasn’t great and serious and high and mighty, what was it?” Mr. Ross isn’t necessarily arguing that classical music need to be universally appreciated, but he is interested in reorienting it away from the notion that it can only be appreciated by an elite audience, and that it should not exist as an entity completely separate from other genres of music—including punk and hip-hop and pop, all of which Mr. Ross has written about. It’s really a way of thinking about classical music that is forward-thinking, rather than a perspective that privileges the past.

“The main thing that distinguishes him is he communicates a real, abiding enthusiasm for the vibrancy of today’s musical culture,” says New York magazine classical music and architecture critic Justin Davidson. “There’s nothing nostalgic or jaded about him. He writes as an engaged reporter—he goes out, finds out what’s cool and tells us about it.”

Indeed, in his New Yorker columns and on his blog, Mr. Ross has been an early and enthusiastic champion of young composers. He was one of the first major critics, for example, to write about the 36-year-old British composer Thomas Adès, who was recently the subject of a retrospective of his work at the Barbican in London; and a piece he did in 2004 presaged the success of such student composers as Nico Muhly, whose commissioned score for the American Ballet Theatre premieres later this month.

“There’s kind of a great new sense of energy among younger composers,” Ross said. “I don’t really know how to define it. In some ways it’s total chaos, because there are so many things going on at once. But there’s also a sense of optimism, sort of. I think they also see possibilities for classical music.”

In some ways, Mr. Ross continued, “classical music is the new underground. That may sound ridiculous, but there’s a grain of truth to it. People are talking about the power that comes with being apart from mainstream pop culture. You can make a living and get stuff performed.”

The classical performance industry—the opera houses and symphonies and chamber music societies, the conservatories and the festivals—“is this very weird combination of ultra-establishment things, and the underground, especially contemporary music,” says Mr. Ross. “It’s a very interesting, fluid situation.”

WHILE SHOWING THE OBSERVER AROUND THE CHELSEA apartment he shares with Mr. Lisecki, Mr. Ross pulled a program booklet for the 1980 world premiere of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera Donnerstag aus Licht, which Stockhausen had autographed for a fan—and signed off with a cartoon heart. He also played a recording of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, in which he is heard yelling, in his thick German accent, into a wire recorder given to him by his student: “You mean I should speak now?” His wife is heard in the background, and he barks at her: “The noises that you make are recording!” Mr. Ross seemed delighted at this; famous classical music composers yell at their wives! And don’t know how to work the damn machine!

Both of these artifacts are kept in Mr. Ross’s office, which is home to thousands of classical CD’s and books, all housed in floor-to-ceiling shelving Mr. Ross had custom-built when he moved into the apartment in 2001. More books—mostly British literature and poetry, German literature and (thanks to an article he wrote) true crime—line the hallway; the living room holds his impressive collection of talk-show host biographies (Cavett, by Dick Cavett; I Kid You Not, by former Tonight Show host Jack Paar), which he needed for a New Republic article, and the DVD collection, which is heavy on the Criterion Collection and HBO series, particularly The Sopranos and The Wire. “We’re also very into Heroes and Ugly Betty,” he said.

On top of the television are four curiously shaped gold statuettes. “Every year, Jonathan and I host an Oscar party,” he explained. “The winner of the bracket gets a spray-painted Aunt Jemima as a prize. We’ve won four. We spray-paint them in the stairwell. So far, no one’s caught us.”

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and—Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and— Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”

I haven't a clue, except misplaced ego. In the darkest, cringe-making essentials, I can't imagine why anyone would put themselves through it, including myself. The only occasion I've ever performed onstage, I was flattered into it at college. I performed for one disastrous night only in a cabaret with a friend who wanted to be a professional comic. I can feel this sickening sensation rising in the pit of my stomach at the memory. It was the worst night, apparently, in the history of Oxford cabaret. We were so bad the audience kept calling us back for an encore. I tell you, good friends were in that audience. The louses. What did they know? Why, they wouldn't know God-given talent if they saw it.

Not that I'm bitter. Je ne regrette rien , as we say in showbiz. I soon got over it as I edged out of hiding. I had no professional ambitions, unlike my co-performer, whom I recently met again in London after all these years. He's a High Court judge now. "Well, somebody's got to do it," he said with a wink. I was glad to see he hasn't lost the patter.

As a general rule, if you've no talent as a performer, it's best not to be one. The tiny tot on Star Search impersonating Britney Spears for a shot at fame, the desperate comic who's dead behind the eyes, the crooner of a certain age segueing into "Feelings," the overconfident, beaming best man rising from his seat to the reverberating champagne glass at the wedding, exist in a twilight zone of denial. They don't mean to embarrass us, but they do. The reluctant, awful truth is that they have no talent.

On the other hand, it takes real talent to perform badly on purpose; to do it well takes perverse genius. Which brings me to the strange, unsettling downtown duo known as Kiki and Herb, currently having a successful run in Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre , directed by Scott Elliott, at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Kiki, the cabaret performer-the description "drag artist" devalues the goods-is a failed cruise-ship lounge act accompanied by the modest, obliging Herb at the piano. A "boozy chanteusie," as she puts it in her elegant way, the alcoholic, kitschy Kiki must be about 60 and hasn't necessarily seen better days. It might not dawn on you for a while, so good are they both at what they do, that the compellingly weird Kiki and Herb are a wicked send-up of confessional, second-rate showbiz.

Kiki is the creation of the much younger Justin Bond, who wrote the show's book with its autobiographical interludes between a surprising repertoire of songs by Eminem, Kate Bush, Radiohead and more. The foundling Herb is the pianist and accomplished musician Kenny Mellman-a modest, long-suffering young man, it seems, who can become engagingly manic during such inspirational numbers as "I'm Ugly and I Don't Know Why."

Kiki's humor is dark, maudlin, sick even, and absolutely straight-faced. "A lot of people jumped out of windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929," Kiki confides about her deprived childhood. "But not all of them died. My father was such a man …. " She's uninhibited, in her way: "I've always said if you weren't molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid." She's quite wise, too: "People die. That's all you need to know." Among Kiki's own children, her beloved Coco, age 7, fell overboard during a cruise while Mom was below-deck indulging in wanton carnal desire. "Ladies and gentlemen," the bereft Kiki appeals to us, haunted by Coco's tragic death, "where the hell can a kid go on the deck of a boat?"

Kiki and Herb are new to me, I must confess, though they've had their own cult following for years on the downtown circuit. I avoided them in the horribly mistaken belief that they're a nostalgic throwback to the tired cabaret days of camp in the Village. They're much cleverer than that, edgier and dangerous, threatening manic mayhem. Kiki suggests a faux, elderly 1950's mother-performer mixed in with the new blood of furious neopunk-no simple thing to be. (No simple thing to want to be.) The musical numbers are Kiki's pathetic attempt to update an act in permanent decline. If you haven't heard her take-no-prisoners rendition of Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon," you've missed one of the great theatrical happenings. It isn't a pretty sound, though.

"Kiki singing Eminem is ridiculous," Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted shrewdly, taking one example of Kiki's sly art. "But no less ridiculous than Eminem, a white kid, mimicking black culture, or the Talking Heads incorporating African beats into their SoHo art rock. Every singer, even Gil Scott-Heron, is pretending in one way or another-putting on drag-and Kiki does the service of bulldozing all the facades of authenticity."

From the start, I was struck that both Kiki and Herb had drawn age lines on their faces-deliberately letting them show. I'd never seen anything like it before, as if they were wearing face masks crudely drawn by children. Why let the lines show? They're letting us know that appearances are fake. They're telling us they themselves aren't real.

Well, they're performers. We know they're not for real. But how sure can we be? The line between the authentic and the fake is never certain with Kiki and Herb. "Kiki loves you, sweetie," she says to us lovingly. You'd be crazy to believe her. Her radical kitsch comes from a plastered, dysfunctional world of false promises and fake emotion where nothing is real.

At certain moments, she has a way of tapping her temple with a finger, as if to say: "Kiki knows !" She punctuates the knowing gesture with a clicking sound. But the reassuring sign is simultaneously alarming, as if she's holding an imaginary gun to her temple. The world is out of control. Kiki knows!

Bang!

There's more to the lady than meets the androgynous façade, that's for sure. The act unravels in an alcoholic haze of regret about the duo's late-1960's comeback album, Kiki & Herb: It's Not Unusual . But the bizarre act itself can be uneven. For me-but not for Kiki-a couple of songs less and a few minutes more of her sick comic vignettes would have been just swell. But you never know with Kiki and Herb (and never knowing is the name of the game). They're gifted and unique performers. After all, nobody does it badly better.

Have you ever wondered why New York is always teeming with Oscar parties, but you never hear anything about Grammy parties? We'll tell you why: Rock stars can't dress! Their idea of a snappy outfit is a shredded T-shirt over some tights, and maybe some kind of big shearling coat. Also: The Recording Academy is still handing out an award for "Best Polka Album." Tonight on the other coast, The Daily Show 's Jon Stewart hosts the Grammys as vastly overrated R&B singer Alicia Keys goes up against mellowing proselytizers U2 …. Meanwhile, back home, the Museum of Modern Art previews an exhibit of amateur photos of our town called Life of the City , a tribute to the city post–Sept. 11. "Of course, if the museum just opened its doors and said, 'We'll hang everything anybody brings us,' we wouldn't be doing our job," said curator Peter Galassi . "But if you're in the mood to help us, we need more pictures by ordinary people: a corner deli, the nutty friend at the party …. They're going to be put up-not casually, but they're going to be put up with pushpins." O.K., Pete, you asked for it: A pic of our nutty friend at the party is on its way to you!

[Grammys, CBS, 8 p.m.; Life of the City , deliver your photo in person to 11 West 53rd Street, exhibit opens to the public tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., 708-9400, push 7 for information on submitting.]

Thursday 28th

Heimel maneuvers: If you're like us, you're completely sick of the whole single-woman-whining-about-her-plight-over-Cosmos genre-and when, exactly, did the feminist ideal morph from the sensibly randy Simone de Beauvoir to the bubblebrains on HBO's version of Sex and the City ?-but way back in 1983, when most of those tootsies were still in tube socks, Cynthia Heimel wrote the seminal Sex Tips for Girls and, we swear, it's one o f the best books of all tim e , right up there with Anna Karenina ! Now she's publishing Advanced Sex Tips for Girls , and so we tracked her down in Los Angeles, where she was visiting her 31-year-old son, Brodie, a producer. "I'm just so sad I ever left New York," she told us between deep drags on an American Spirit Light. "It was just such a mistake. I left because I lost my job at Vogue , there were crackheads every night screaming on my block-and it was a good block- and all my friends had disappeared because I had stopped going to nightclubs. I was lonely and scared and depressed, so I thought, ' I'll go to L.A. because it's sunshiney .' Big mistake-what can I say?" Now she lives in Oakland with her four dogs and 6-foot-2 younger boyfriend , who is six years older than her son. Oakland, she said, is "a really nice place to live if you're a woman of a certain age, which is 47, something like that. There is a lot of intelligence . The cons are, they are a bunch of control-freak maniacs who are really serious about being politically correct . Since I left New York, I feel underappreciated, if you must know the truth." Tonight Ms. Heimel reads and signs in Chelsea, after a mad dash through Loehmann's shoe department.

[Barnes & Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue, 7:30 p.m., 727-1227.]

Friday 1st

It's March, and everyone's dancin '! Just try to avoid getting trampled tonight! Nancy Karp and her Dancers are flying in like a bunch of reindeer from San Francisco (uh-oh) to premiere Kalasam , which was inspired by India. Meanwhile, Savion Glover (tap, tap, tap) is M.C.'ing the " World's Best Tap Dancers Aged 21 and Under" in midtown …. Also, the Heather Harrington Dance Company is out in Williamsburg, which Th e New York Times has finally discovered, rapidly dooming it to become the next Upper West Side.

[Nancy Karp and Dancers, Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, 8 p.m., 334-7479; Savion Glover, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 8 p.m., 307-4100; Heather Harrington Dance Company, 205 North Seventh Street, Brooklyn, 8 p.m., 718-599-7997.]

Saturday 2nd

Remember Wonder Woman? And trying to dress up like her for Halloween when you were little , except your half-heartedly bohemian mom wouldn't fork up for the Underoos ("too commercial"), so you wound up pasting gold stars on a T-shirt?… Tonight, Chicago comic-book artist Alex Ross - not the secret alter ego of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (we think )-headlines a charity event featuring an exhibit of art from his new graphic novel, Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth . What it benefits: Sept. 11 charities. "Wonder Woman's special quality is that she's coming from an idealized society," said Mr. Ross, "somewhere better than here. The Amazons are completely at peace with each other, their society is a utopia of sorts , and she comes to us representing the peace and wisdom of the Amazons." But screw the philosophy-when's the big splashy Hollywood movie ? "So far as I know, Sandra Bullock has the rights to do something with it , but they're very shy of trying, because they fear the character coming across as ludicrous in today's times-which is a misleading conjecture, because if you think about it, the character was reinvented almost in totality as Xena ."

[CB's 313 Gallery, 313 Bowery, 8 p.m., 677-0455.]

Sunday 3rd

Oscar heat is building … but first, it's the dulling vapors of the Stony Awards , the Oscars of High Times magazine, which we hear humiliated the New Yorker team on the softball field last summer. Celebrity wattage: Snoop Dogg. Interestingly, Stony nominee The Anniversary Party is better than an awful lot of this year's Oscar-nominated films . "We're moving it uptown," said High Times senior editor Greg Casseus. "We kind of felt like we wanted the show to be a little more glamorous. In terms of attire, I don't really care-when I say 'glamour,' I mean sort of a soirée along the lines of the Golden Globes, as opposed to a glass of wine and a slice of hemp pizza." Does he and his staff ever get busted? "Why should we? We're not the only office in New York that has pot smokers!" True-one of our cubicle mates smells like the lower decks on a Colombian banana boat!

[B.B. King's Blues Club and Grill, 243 West 42nd Street, 8 p.m., 387-0500.]

Monday 4th

More proof that baby boomers just aren't going to roll over and go quietly into that dark Westchester: My Generation , kind of the Sassy to Modern Maturity 's Seventeen , throws a party (celebrity wattage: um, Pete Seeger ) to celebrate its first anniversary and 3.8 million subscribers, who get it free with AARP membership (AARP used to stand for American Association of Retired Persons , but because boomers don't retire-they just become consultants-it now stands for nada ), and something called the Genny Awards that they've conferred upon Julia Child, the Pill and Muhammad Ali. "There's a new executive director and a whole new branding campaign!" said My Generation editor in chief and peppy boomer Betsy Carter. "Boomers have sort of changed aging, and are changing how we're aging. First of all, they don't think they are - we all think we're 35 . Also, we tend to be in kind of better shape , and we know more song lyrics ; we're much more in sync with a younger group of people. I'm going off to Costa Rica for a week on Friday!" Cra-zy! Meanwhile, Grammys aftershock in midtown as dusky pop singer Nelly Furtado does her strange, lurching dance at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

[Genny Awards, Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 255-8455; Nelly Furtado, Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, call Ticketmaster.]

Tuesday 5th

Level III chef groupies, the truly desperate breed ( house husbands with house accounts at Williams-Sonoma and big, well-oiled butcher blocks ), descend on Lincoln Center, where they'll watch cuddly Babbo celebri-chef Mario Batali narrate a piece called The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine by composer Aaron Jay Kernis , played by one of those modern-music chamber groups with ladies in billowing Yohji Yamamoto black skirts and men with prominent Adam's apples.

[Alice Tully Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, 8 p.m., 721-6500.]

Wednesday 6th

Even the circus is falling prey to the "girl power" scam . "Never before has the Greatest Show On Earth featured so many women headliners in such dramatically divergent displays of derring-do, " boasts the press release for the 132nd edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Here comes Sara, the famed Tiger Whisperer ; Circus Siren Sylvia Zerbini; and, of course, Mei Ling the Motorcycle Maiden ( vrooom )-umm, is this the circus, or the Penthouse Forum? And tell us something else: Since they have all these babes on their roster, why on earth did they send a picture of T.M., the "Gator Guy"? (See off-putting photo.)

[Beat the crowds-the circus comes to Madison Square Garden on March 21-and schlep ironically out to the Continental Airlines Arena, somewhere in New Jersey, tonight; www.Ringling.com.]