They came for the coffee. (YouTube)

No, there isn’t a hip noise-rock band called UFO tearing up the Brooklyn scene.

But there are literally unidentified flying objects burning across the borough’s sky, according to the intrepid folks over at UFO Sightings Daily. The website alleges that three “glowing UFOs” were spotted at the corner of Dean Street and Vanderbilt Avenue on Dec. 3. The video, hazy in that dubiously alluring way, shows three little dots moving through the night sky.

"This seems totally crazy but we saw strange lights over Brooklyn again tonight," an "eyewitness" told the website.

"There were three orbs glowing like fire and again flying in formation. Each of the three finally stopped at the same point in the sky, hovered, and then disappeared."

The slow-moving dots could be carrying the conquerors of the human race or even celestial fairies come at last to liberate our germ world, unleashing eons of fifth-dimensional bliss.

Or they could be airplanes. The choice is yours!

The patchy, ragged grass only adds to Fort Greene's trying but not trying to hard appeal.

Do you live in Fort Greene? Enjoy sipping seasonal cocktails outside of Roman's, playing fetch with your dog in Fort Greene park, bragging to all your friends about how low key and undiscovered and underrated Fort Greene is? Well, if you rent you should probably start skimming the real estate listings right now, as Fort Greene has been declared Brooklyn's most livable neighborhood by The L Magazine.

Of course, its hard to tell if readers of the hipster glossy will take the ranking to heart, following the prevailing counter cultural fashions of the day, or if they will display a contrarian streak, as they are sometimes wont to do, and seek out the next industrial wasteland to remake in their tattooed image.

The magazine rated the neighborhoods of Brooklyn based on 10 livability measures, among them affordability, culture, greenspace, food, nightlife and accessibility. They selected 13 to highlight; a list that, with the exception of Windsor Terrace and the omission of Crown Heights, should surprise no one.

Fort Greene snagged the top spot on account of its accessibility (two subway lines), abundant green space, stunning brownstones and proximity to cultural institutions like BAM and Greenlight Books. Although, in what may be a nod to the increasing costs of living in Brooklyn, The L Magazine suggests living over the border in Clinton Hill for cheaper rent (alas, even in the outerboroughs, New Yorkers are reduced to living on the proximity of the most desirable neighborhoods).

Park Slope nabbed second place in the rankings, followed by Prospect Heights, fourth place went to an amalgamation that the editors refer to as "South Brooklyn" and Greenpoint took fifth, although the description of Greenpoint was insult-laden, beginning thusly: "It would be disingenuous to continue describing Greenpoint as Williamsburg’s idyllic, under-the-radar northern neighbor."

The other most livable neighborhoods include Dumbo, Williamsburg (which they deem the go-to neighborhood for interesting people trying to do interesting things despite its ugly architecture and yuppification), Ditmas Park, Brooklyn Heights, Bushwick, Red Hook, Windsor Terrace and Gowanus "the nice thing about Gowanus is that it has remained zoned industrial."

As with any New York rankings, these will no doubt produce a mixture of joy, anxiety, bruised pride and bragging. We want our neighborhood to be the best! Our neighborhood is the best! But we don't want anyone to know it is the best! Or, alternately: Those list makers don't know what they're doing. How could they slight our neighborhood's subtle charms? Charms so subtle that they reflect our exquisite taste? We don't even want to be on their idiotic list. Let those other neighborhoods have all the tourists and the poseurs and the recent graduates of the nation's best liberal arts colleges. And so on.

kvelsey@observer.com

Manhattan living, but in Brooklyn

Things may have looked bleak during the recession for On Prospect Park, but the tower's most expensive penthouse has finally sold for $5.1 million, just as everyone knew it eventually would.

Are boom times here again? Well, when it comes to gentrification in Brooklyn, Prospect Heights in particular, it's not a question of if but when, and Prospect Heights was already pretty far gone when the sleek tower was just a rough sketch in Richard Meier's head. Even if The New York Times did call the starchitect-designed condo "a wall of windows into the real estate bust" back in 2009.

Never-before-occupied penthouse 16S was the most expensive condo on the market and the $5.1 million sale (at ask, but maybe not original ask) sets the record for On Prospect Park (known to the postal service as 1 Grand Army Plaza). The next highest sale was another penthouse—there are five—that went for $3.9 million last winter. That was eclipsed just yesterday by the sale of penthouse 16N, which Brownstoner reported sold for $4.9 million, though today's sale of the neighboring unit now bests that.

So who bought this shiny, many-windowed, prodigiously-terraced 3,500-square foot penthouse? The clandestine KFRC Brooklyn LLC., that's who. And KFRC may live in a glass-walled house, that doesn't mean he/she/they wants to be seen.

Corcoran Sunshine listing broker Cheryl Nielson-Saaf told us that she had to keep absolutely mum on the buyers when we reached her on the phone. The project is now being brokered by Brown Harris Stevens, as well.

Perhaps it's a Manhattan ex-pat frustrated by ever-rising rents? Or a Brooklynite who wants the ease of doormen and swimming pools rather than trudging up and down the stairs of some quaint brownstone?

In any event, the buyer will be getting a master bedroom suite with views of the harbor and its own private terrace, as well as a living/dining room and kitchen that span over 50 feet with balconies and terraces across the full width. There's also a huge private roof terrace, where you can sit among your lovely greenery and gaze out at the greenery of Prospect Park.

Plus, at 75 percent full, the building's no longer the ghost town it once was.

kvelsey@observer.com

Mr. Riney, a navigator of Brooklyn's shifting landscape.

To look at the buildings neighboring it, 567 Vanderbilt Avenue is a typical four-story, mixed-use apartment building in Brooklyn. From the bricks it was built with to the upwardly mobile professionals and strollers it presumably houses, the structure is nearly identical to the other assets in that corner of Prospect Heights.

With a recent shift on the ground—characterized by relatively new restaurants like James, Cornelius and, inevitably, the Vanderbilt—sales prices in the neighborhood are rising.

But over on Vanderbilt Avenue in particular, where trendy bars and cafés pop up each week, prices are absolutely surging, in part because of Nostradamus-like predictions of basketball fans flooding the zone once the Nets start playing inside the proposed Atlantic Yards arena and, ultimately, exiting en masse from doors leading directly to the street.

It was with those paradigm shifts in mind that, two weeks ago, 567 Vanderbilt Avenue changed hands for $1.3 million, a notable $50,000 above the initial asking price. Working behind the scenes was Shaun Riney, a 25-year-old Marcus & Millichap commercial real estate broker who has emerged out of nowhere as the face of multifamily housing deals in one of New York City’s most rapidly changing neighborhoods.

“It’s kind of, in a sense, ‘A rising tide will lift all boats,’” Mr. Riney said last week of the cruise ship-size arena that’s expected to be completed and ready for the 2013 National Basketball Association season.

The old-fashioned way for greenhorns to break into New York’s commercial real estate scene is a simple yet competitive process: reach out to the big firms—CB Richard Ellis, Cushman & Wakefield, Jones Lang LaSalle, for example—and pray for a break, get in, and spend the first year watching veterans ink deals.

Or they can go to the Brooklyn office of Marcus & Millichap, which for the past four years has offered brokers the chance to cut teeth in a borough brimming with profitable commercial real estate possibilities.

Launched in 2007 by J.D. Parker, now the Northeast regional director of Marcus & Millichap, the firm brought more than 25 young brokers into its offices in downtown Brooklyn to negotiate a combination of multifamily, retail and office deals. In four years, the firm has seen its sales numbers explode, rising from $28 million in 2007 to nearly $40 million in 2010.

“We’re on track to have our best year ever in Brooklyn,” said Mr. Parker. “And a lot of that is due to Shaun.”

Mr. Riney, a Detroit native with a physical resemblance to Boiler Room and Hawaii Five-0 actor Scott Caan and the track record of a much older and experienced broker, has closed 330,685 square feet in property deals and has handled $85.2 million worth of listings. During his first year at Marcus & Millichap’s Boston office in 2008—while working alongside then-colleague Zach Felson—he closed more than $35 million in sales, a feat that earned him the firm’s in-house “Rookie of the Year” honors.

Mr. Riney was given his own team in 2010, closing $18.1 million in property sales that same year. He received his second accolade, the “Marcus & Millichap Rising Star Award,” in January 2011.

Sitting in his bare Brooklyn office—adorned with little more than detailed maps of Brooklyn—Mr. Riney said he spends his weekends not at sports bars watching football with friends but scouring Property Shark listings, looking for his next big running pattern.

“This is the environment I love to be in,” said Mr. Riney, now an associate at the firm’s national multihousing group. “[It’s] fast-paced, intense, competitive, where every day can be a $50,000 day or a dud, depending on how much you want to work at it.”

Mr. Riney sells a variety of multifamily housing and mixed-use properties in Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Greene. And with the unveiling of Atlantic Yards just a year away, he thinks now is the perfect time for prospective buyers to invest near the massive—and controversial—new development in Prospect Heights.

He believes that the arrival of new tenants—the Atlantic Yards project is looking to add more than 6,300 units—and a growing local workforce—such as in the new office building on 470 Vanderbilt Avenue that recently signed the New York City Human Resources Administration to a new lease deal—will bring more new renters, prospective home owners and a new cadre of consumers to local retail.

More important, the development will encourage investors to snatch up mixed-use properties in the surrounding territories for future retail locations. He thinks that is especially the case for Vanderbilt and Washington avenues, mere blocks away from Atlantic Yards.

“I’d say 75-to-85 percent of Washington Avenue is mom-and-pop retail,” said Mr. Riney. “That’s the fringe, where an investor can still get in relatively cheaply in terms of the basis with nothing but, in my opinion, upside on a five- to 20-year time rise, which is what most real estate investors are looking at.”

At 567 Vanderbilt Avenue, for example, the building features a 600-square-foot commercial storefront, where the estimated rent tops out at $50 per square foot. “That rent will only increase as the project comes to fruition,” Mr. Riney said of a space that some day could house yet another trendy new restaurant.

A lot of his listings are multifamily buildings that feature retail—like 437-439 Tompkins Avenue that sold for $1.35 million, and a mixed-use building on 690 Prospect Place now on the market for $1.025 million.

“The bread and butter of Brooklyn in general is multifamily mixed-use buildings,” said Mr. Riney. “That’s what is selling right now, that’s what banks are willing to finance, and that is the majority of the housing stock in northern Brooklyn, and I think it’s the asset class which I think has the most potential.”

Brooklyn buyers, for the most part, agree. Thirty-nine multifamily buildings in the borough sold for a total of more than $116 million in the third quarter of this year—a dramatic improvement from the 14 buildings bought at $44 million at the same time last year, according to an Ariel Property Advisors quarterly report.

Mr. Riney got his taste for real estate when, as a senior at Boston University, he leased out his four-bedroom apartment to a group of sophomores at a $3,000 profit. He continued selling and leasing apartments in Boston during 2005, before making the move to New York City three years later.

Mr. Riney interviewed with CB Richard Ellis and Jones Lang LaSalle before sitting down with Mr. Parker and Mr. Felson for an interview at Marcus & Millichap’s Court Street office in downtown Brooklyn.

Another young broker was hired at the same time as Mr. Riney. Mr. Felson initially had his doubts about the young man from Detroit while holding a torch for the other hire. A year later, however, Mr. Riney and Mr. Felson had their profitable partnership, while the other hire had dropped out of the business entirely.

“[Riney is] not afraid of rejection in a business where you’re on purely a commission base,” said Mr. Felson, 28, who is now a senior vice president at Prado, a San Francisco-based real estate company. “I’d seen many guys come in and fall out of the business in six months because they couldn’t deal with hearing the word ‘no.’ He was really undeterred.”

And he’s made himself at home with Marcus & Millichap. Mr. Riney, a lifelong Newcastle United fan, plays on the Brooklyn Football Club with Mr. Parker and other colleagues at the firm.

He also has no plans to leave Brooklyn.

“My game plan is to continue to expand in northern Brooklyn,” said Mr. Riney. “There is a ton of untapped value in the Brooklyn marketplace, in these Brooklyn buildings, and I want to be a part of that.”
drosen@observer.com

Give me your morbier and no one gets hantavirus.

As if the traffic and sports bars weren't bad enough, the construction of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project has triggered an all-too-apt infestation of Rattus norvegicus in neighboring Prospect Heights and Fort Greene.

Last Thursday night, local City Council rep Letitia James held a meeting for neighbors to outline their rat complaints, which included:

• Rummaging through garbage
• Eating garbage
• Eating garbage under cars
• Eating garbage under cars and sparking fires
• Eating car insulation
• Rummaging through heirloom vegetable gardens
• Chewing through car insulation
• Gnawing through (no doubt historic or artisian) brownstone doors
• Climbing up legs
• Rats the size of cats
• Rats the size of dogs
• Rats the size of rats
• Rat tsunamis
• Hissing
• Two stolen Bugaboos, with babies attached.

O.K., so we made that last one up, but the hysteria has reached such epic proportions, it seems possible. After all, The Brooklyn Paper is worried about the hantavirus infecting BroBos this summer if things don't get better. Given their weak constitutions, it is bound to be a deadly epidemic.

A Forest City Ratner spokesman suggested checking with the city, but that only seems to confirm the neighborhood's nagging concerns. The 311 complaints for rats jumped nearly half around the arena, from 190 last year to 313 this year, and further east, where vacant buildings still stand or have recently been demolished, things are even worse. Complaints have risen nearly three-fold, from 179 to 501.

"We have had a full abatement program in place for years, long before construction started. We continue to monitor the actual site and will work with M.T.A., ESDC and the city," the Forest City Ratner spokesman wrote in an email.

Neighbors want enclosed garbage cans and traps spread throughout the neighborhood at Ratner's expense, charging that enough taxpayer money has already been given away to the developer.

Maybe if they just changed their name to Forest City Catnip, it would solve the problem.

According to the Daily News:

- "The Queens nabe renowned for its diversity is now seeing an influx of young professionals starting families who are getting priced out of the Slope and Astoria.."

- And, luckily, there are "plenty of chic boutiques and cafes catering to the new kids on the block are springing up along 37th Ave."

- "Jackson Heights is just a 20-minute commute from midtown on the E/F/M/R/7 trains, but seems a world apart."

- But! While it feels like the suburbs, "it's really multicultural," according to an Astoria ex-pat.

According to The Journal:

- "Today, Jackson Heights, with its historic district, large and light-filled prewar apartments and side streets lined with houses, draws a diverse cross-section of New Yorkers seeking affordability and accessibility."

- A lot of these newcomers in recent years are "young professionals ... priced out of areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn."

- And!  "It is also home to a sizable gay community, and the area hosts the annual gay pride parade in Queens..."

- Still: "Though the neighborhood is lush with large, private gardens, it has little public park space."

Being as cynical as we are, we read phrases such as "chic boutiques" and "young professionals" and "priced out of areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn" as harbingers of a dawn of rapid gentrification for Jackson Heights (and when there's ever an earnest discussion about the number/quality of parks/playgrounds, that's never a good sign for long-time residents). Plus, why is diversity news in New York City? It's like a bad marketing job: "We have two Michelin-reviewed restaurants, three Starbucks and lots of diversity!"

Though one wonders what took everyone so long: This paper has wondered aloud about hipsters in Ridgewood and has declared the Q the new L when it comes to the outer reaches of Brooklyn.

tacitelli@observer.com :: @tacitelli

I have spent this summer, my first after graduation, writing about real estate and house-sitting on the Upper East Side—essentially, I have been on a safari through various ways of being wealthy, none of which I expect to experience again. Fourteen rooms of books, houseplants, and beautiful prewar wallpaper: a friend characterized “my” apartment as “like The Real World house, but for old people.” It’s been unreal, and it’s ending. The lady of the house returns just before Labor Day. I need a new place to live.

My standards are necessarily low. I just want to find an apartment that I can imagine living in: plausible neighborhood, plausible living space, plausible transportation. My mail-order bride of a roommate arrives from Harvard next month, and in her absence, I’m doing the Craigslist and the visits. Brooklyn is my default setting—the only peers I know in Manhattan are either bankers or parentally underwritten. After some good word of mouth on Crown Heights (So cozy! So cheap! A real neighborhood!) and some pleasant weekends in Park Slope, Prospect Heights seemed as good a place as any to start.

Prospect Heights two-bedrooms for $1,600: There were ample offerings for anyone willing to do the Internet sifting. But were they bogus? Secretly ugly? Actually tiny? And how squishy and useless was “Prospect Heights” as a label? So, with an older and more legitimately adult companion in tow, I sallied forth.

Our first impressions: positive. We start the day on Vanderbilt Avenue; we browse used books, contemplate brunch options, feel good about Prospect Heights. We set off along Bergen Street.

We keep walking. In a few blocks, we’ve gone from used books to bodegas to industrial detritus.

“Is this still Prospect Heights?” my companion asks. “Is that a prison?”

This seems unlikely. But it does have narrow window slits, a fortress-like wall, and a whole bunch of barbed wire.

Our destination, 891 Bergen, is an unprepossessing red structure with green trim. Across the street at 892 stands a shiny tower of condos: If—if—I were here on behalf of The Observer, that’s where I’d be; I’d feel out of place but also well air-conditioned and clean. Instead, I’m scuttling around in the rental tide pools like the cheap little scavenger crab that I am.

Several brokers scramble for custody of confused prospective tenants outside 891, but the apartment inside hardly warrants their anxiety. It’s a dark womb of kitchen/living space, tiny and totally window-free, flanked by bedrooms on either end. There’s a single small closet, and lots of exposed brick. This seems intended to convey the impression that grit is a great aesthetic choice rather than a neighborhood liability.

MY APARTMENT-HUNTING VIRGINITY is gone and I’ll never get it back. Onward and upward. We venture deeper into Brooklyn and away from any sense of neighborhood familiarity.

“We are near the auto zone, though,” says my companion.

“JESUS CHRIST IS THE LORD,” says the hugest storefront church in the world. (this church : regular storefront church :: Costco : corner store). Soon we arrive at apartment number two, on Fulton Street, right above Hoopz Lounge.

This apartment sprawls but makes no sense: it is maze-like. Three entrances, two windowless common spaces, two bedrooms, one with a small antechamber—a dressing room? Quarters for secret roommates? I don’t know. I don’t need it. I don’t own much stuff, so I’d rather have less space in a better neighborhood. We depart.

On the Franklin Avenue shuttle we fly above the barbed wire and possible prison like majestic birds or something. When we emerge at the Botanic Garden stop, comforting sights greet us. Trees! The Brooklyn Museum! A big school for deaf people! Awesome.

We meet a broker at her office on Washington Avenue and set out for apartment number three. As we walk farther and farther from the Brooklyn Museum, the tantalizing promise of subway convenience begins to slip away. The broker points out a beer garden. The broker points out a bakery. We lose all sense of spatial orientation. All that exists is small talk, heat, and our feeling of purpose.

The Prospect Place apartment we arrive at is fine but unremarkable: a bedroom in front, a bedroom in back, wide kitchen, narrow hallway, and a living room as dark as I’ve come to expect. It has windows, I guess, but they face a brick wall. I could look out into the airshaft and think about my tenement-dwelling forebears.

We trace a more direct route back toward the subway, and realize that our final apartment lies just a few blocks beyond. We pass bodegas galore, markets, and restaurants. The neighborhood seems welcoming and not yet bougie; it puts a spring in our sweaty steps.

The wide lobby of our final building has ornate moldings and appealingly decrepit tile work. It may not be the geriatric Real World, but it’s a level of opulence more suited to my station.

Inside the apartment, the ceilings are high. The rooms (all spacious) bear totally normal relationships to one another. The current tenants show us their many closets, and the back fire escape where a neighbor-lady bums cigarettes. Glorious, angelic light floods every room. No dishwasher, but what are you going to do? I can scrub.

“Get that one,” says my companion. I think I will.

mfischer@observer.com

Within five months, the couple were in Oslo, Norway, the first stop in their 15-country, seven-week backpacking, CouchSurfing.com European tour. They were searching for beer recipes and ideas that would ferment into the July 4, 2009, opening of the Brooklyn Brew Shop, a retail business of brewing supplies and recipes that enables Brooklyn's growing craft-beer fetish in all of its forms, from purism to absurdism.

Mr. Valand, 23, and Ms. Shea, 25, aren't alone in exhibiting the fiscal moxy that has seized various New Yorkers in this Great Recession: the guts to slough off day jobs—Mr. Valand worked in commercial production, Ms. Shea still does some marketing on the side—and start a business when signs point to "no," and a retail business at that.

But then many of the consumer trends that preceded the recession seem made for one. The Brooklyn Brew Shop certainly fits in well with the do-it-yourself food movement: slow food and organic produce, reusable canvas bags at the Park Slope Co-op and herb gardens in pots on the stoop, the feral desire to place your belly at the mercies of your own ability to scavenge for food and drink.

And to take it languidly; and to enjoy it.

"The nice thing about being there," Mr. Valand said of Europe, "was realizing that not everyone works all the time. And not everyone needs to get or buy anything they want at any hour of the day." Brewing, start to finish, takes a few hours—and then a few weeks of waiting on fermentation and aging. "It helps everyone relax a bit."

But their particular brand of beer enthusiasm also embraces the national, maybe international, movement—for lack of a better term, as it’s not particularly organized and, almost by definition, doesn’t move in lockstep—pioneered by the likes of Mr. Calagione at Dogfish that says beer doesn’t have to fit a particular barley-hops-yeast rubric. It can be what you can imagine it to be.

Like Grapefruit Honey Ale, the Brooklyn Brew Shop’s best seller right now. Or a beer that tastes like peach cobbler; or chocolate and maple; or lobster; or, what the hell—change we can believe in!—beer that tastes like s’mores, the graham-cracker–melted-marshmallow amalgam you may remember from summer camp.

These recipes are hatched and alchemized in the more spacious Prospect Heights apartment of Mr. Valand—‘My apartment fits nothing,’ said Ms. Shea of her Lower East Side place.

Neither was a particular connoisseur before they started brewing.

“I didn’t even like beer,” Ms. Shea said over pints of pilsner and pale ale at a Flatiron pub earlier this month. “There were a few beers—I really did like Sam Adams Summer Ale.”

“Blue Moon,” Mr. Valand added.

“Yeah, and Magic Hat.”

“The sort of most accessible …”

“Yeah, people were like, ‘Oh, you hate beer? Try this, you’ll like it.’ I said, ‘O.K.’ Then I realized I just hadn’t been drinking good beer,” said Ms. Shea, a bubblier yin to Mr. Valand’s flatter yang. “I got really, really into Belgian beers after that. And now I can’t go back.”

“I would usually go to a bar and try to find what I never heard of,” Mr. Valand said. “I wouldn’t necessarily remember the next day what it was. I liked good beers but I didn’t really know anything about them or where they came from.”

He and Ms. Shea educated themselves intensively, and quickly.

It started a year before The New Yorker–induced epiphany, and again involved, fittingly enough, given the organic nature of beer, a trip home to parental roots. Ms. Shea discovered her father’s brewing apparatus—“I was in charge of capping at 12,” she said of her father’s hobby, “and drinking all the IBC root beer because he used those bottles.”—and hauled it to New York. They then researched like mad, focusing on the pragmatic side of zymology.

“I definitely came to it more as a recipe thing than as a scientific thing,” Ms. Shea, who likes to cook, said.

“We haven’t spent too much time worrying about our pH levels,” Mr. Valand, who likes to clean, said.

“Anything with an –ology, I avoid.”

“I don’t think either of us had ever fermented anything.”

The couple has the look of junior faculty in the humanities department at some New England college (they met as film students at Boston University and started dating after graduation). Mr. Valand is spectacled and given to slender neckties; Ms. Shea, to sundresses and scarves. A photo on the Brooklyn Brew Shop site shows them at the Cantillon Brewery in Brussels, during their European trip, looking like summering backpackers wearing the best they could haul from the States.

They are earnest in their business approach—you’ll find them at the Brooklyn Flea manning a table, milling grains, and chatting about beer with potential customers; they say they only recently reached the point where their doubts about the viability of the shop were extinguished.

Yet, they’re breezy in their experimentation. Other brewers, even home ones and those cruising the same quirky edges, may not deem it proper to toss lobster shells into the admixture; or to advise the baking of grapefruit rinds.

Who cares? It works. In a recession. In a city that enshrines its farmer's markets.

“We’ve never had a sour batch,” Mr. Valand said. “We’ve never had a batch that’s been undrinkable.”

“We’ve had things that needed to be tweaked,” Ms. Shea said. “Overcarbonation and things like that—nothing that ever went bad.”

“Never one where we’ve spat it out. If you make beer and you keep it clean, it’s always going to be beer. And it might still be better than Budweiser.”

tacitelli@observer.com

Brooklyn, like the rest of New York State, is bound to vote overwhelmingly for Senator Obama, but with the race tightening in its last days – and even with polls heavily in his favor – the residents of Kings County are at once excited and apprehensive about what tomorrow will bring.

Mauri Weakley, 25, a fashion merchandiser who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant was shopping in a local Brooklyn boutique recently when conversation turned to the election. "We were all discussing how we'd either be drinking champagne in celebration for Obama or straight whiskey if it were McCain," she said, adding "this is the first time many of us had ever wanted to post a picture of a potential president, or wear political pins or bags supporting a candidate. For Obama, clearly."

After the previous two presidential elections did not go in the left's favor, much to the dismay of Gore and Kerry supporters here who felt jilted, nothing seems impossible, despite Mr. Obama's lead in the polls. There's a plausible sense among young people in Babylon Brooklyn that the democratic process has eroded to the point where a stolen election would come as no surprise, though a disputed election would garner far more scrutiny now than in previous years.

Down the street from the Gate, at Bar Reis, conversation on the outdoor patio turned to the frightening possibility that John McCain could pull it off and win – a definite doomsday scenario – and what foreign locales might see an influx of ex-pat Americans fleeing the right-wing policies of yet another right-wing president. Chatter across the bar made it apparent that these Brooklynites want nothing more than to wake up on Wednesday to find a smiling President-elect Obama on their television screens; to find President-elect McCain would be sacrilegious.

Though Senator McCain incites less derision than our current president does in Brooklyn, there's a palpable sense among Democratic voters that he is no longer the maverick he claims to be, or perhaps once was. However, the senility displayed by Senator McCain over the final weeks of his campaign barely accounts for the contempt Brooklyn liberals seem to have for the Republican ticket.

With Oliver Stone's film W fresh in the minds of the borough's intellectual class, there's a sense that the Sarah Palin wing of the republican party could prove far more detrimental to a country already brought to its knees by foreign wars and economic crises. "Palin is the next level, it's so scary," a friend had told me after emerging from a screening at the Cobble Hill Cinema.

"I have heard so, so many conversations at the next table over at a bar or restaurant involving somebody's personal critique or analysis of Sarah Palin," emailed Marcus Batista, 30, a retail manager who lives in Greenpoint. "I think that the [political] opinions of most people that I interact with or overhear are pretty unvaried, it's not that interesting or heated of a topic, it's way more fun to talk about Palin."

Some Brooklyn residents, especially those who've traded small-town America for the big city, resent the perception espoused by Ms. Palin and others that the borough and its ilk are less American.

"The best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation," Sarah Palin had said in Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 17.

Lefty Brooklynites might argue that it is the best and brightest of America – the individualists, the leaders – that have split those same small towns. And the implication that such a large swath of America is unpatriotic or somehow less American was greeted by heavy skepticism in taverns across Brooklyn.

Despite the harrowing nature and length of this presidential campaign, twenty- and thirty-something voters across the borough, especially those who voted disproportionately for Ralph Nader in 2000, are excited to have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who they believe is legitimately the best, rather than a lesser of two evils, and actually has a good chance at winning.

With that in mind, Mr. Batista, an Ohio native, hopes to help Mr. Obama just a little bit more by casting an absentee ballot there because he says "my conservative father lives in Stark County and I feel obliged to negate his vote; some call that oedipal, and I think that's gross."

Advocates of landmark designation included Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Council Member Letitia James, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, as well as representatives from Community Board 8, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood District Council, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and others.

"The better Prospect Heights does, the better it is for all of Brooklyn," said Mr. Markowitz, adding that it is "imperative we retain the character of this historic neighborhood."

Ms. James called the designation "long overdue," adding that Prospect Heights has faced development pressures for the last 10 years. "It has already suffered from the demolition of historic buildings," she said.

Those buildings include 330 Park Place, 272 St. Marks Avenue, and 528 Bergen Street, all of which have been torn down since 2005. Residents hope to forestall further demolition in the area, particularly as the Atlantic Yards development on the district's northern end brings increased attention to Prospect Heights.

Many of the neighborhood's properties are "underbuilt," meaning that, since the lots are relatively large, owners can erect additions above and behind existing structures. Historic designation proponents expressed concern over construction that would spoil the uniformity of the heights, windows and sculptural details of the area's brownstones.

Described as "one of Brooklyn's most architecturally distinct areas" by the LPC, Prospect Heights includes row houses that exemplify Italianate, Neo-Grec, and Romanesque Revival architectural styles, many dating back to the late 19th century.

The historic district would cover a puzzle piece-shaped tract of land northeast of Flatbush Avenue and Sterling Place, preserving 870 lots, including residential, institutional and mixed-use properties. Prospect Heights would join neighboring Park Slope and Crown Heights in securing designation status.

"We tried to find people who oppose this – I haven't found one person," said Raul Rothblatt of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and also the executive director of the Four Borough Neighborhood Preservation Alliance, a non-profit organization that advises groups on development issues. "My neighbors all support each other and know each other, and I think that's partly because of the architecture."

Opponents were in the minority, although one local business owner worried that landmark designation would "cripple an owner's effort to lease their storefront," adding that "entry-level tenants" find it difficult to face the conditions imposed by historic district status.

No date has been set for the LPC's final vote, although chairman Robert B. Tierney assured it would take place "without undue delay."