MR. BROOKLYN.(city hall)

Brooklyn's Borough Hall, a Greek Revival building with an Ionic colonnade clad in fine Tuckahoe marble and a roof topped, incongruously, with a Victorian cupola, is a monument to diminished expectations. The first plans for a City Hall--Brooklyn still being independent, at the time--were drawn up in 1802, and the imagined building was intended to rival the grander City Hall rising at that moment in downtown Manhattan. The boldness of that gesture was somewhat undermined by the fact that construction didn't begin for another thirty-four years, and the building was not completed until 1848. When, fifty years later, Brooklyn merged into New York City, the building was downgraded from City Hall to Borough Hall; and this decline in importance has grown more pronounced in the subsequent hundred-odd years--right up to the present, when the building's highest profile is, arguably, attained by the occasional appearance of its imposing courtroom in the television series "Law & Order."

The Borough President's office, in the southeast corner of the building, has recently undergone its own transformation. In the time of Howard Golden, who was Borough President from 1978 to 2002, the desk was positioned at the far end of the room, so that visitors were obliged to make a processional approach to the seat of influence. Under occupation by the incumbent, Marty Markowitz, the office looks less like a sober place of government than like Santa's workshop. On every surface--shelves, tables, window ledges, and cluttering the desk--there are Teddy bears and toy trucks, balls and bats, dolls dressed in the regalia of the Caribbean parade that takes place on Eastern Parkway every Labor Day. The room has been painted a vivid teal; and at the many windows hang curtains of satiny teal fabric, printed with the seal of the borough of Brooklyn. There are enough logo-bearing baseball caps to outfit both major leagues, including a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Above one doorway hangs a plastic basketball hoop, and a store-window mannequin in a corner wears a basketball jersey bearing the numeral 1 and a name: the Brooklyn Nets. These last are testament to Markowitz's enthusiastic embrace of the developer Bruce Ratner's plan to build a $2.5-billion arena and housing- and-commercial-development complex, known as Atlantic Yards, in downtown Brooklyn, and to move the New Jersey Nets, which Ratner bought last year, to Brooklyn. Markowitz's support of the Ratner project has been his most visible act as Borough President; depending on your political outlook, the plan is either a thrilling instance of Brooklyn's economic and cultural resurgence or a shocking capitulation to the interests of Ratner's multibillion-dollar development company, Forest City Ratner.

Markowitz was elected to the office of Borough President in 2001, after spending twenty-three years as a state senator representing first Flatbush and then Crown Heights and Midwood. (He is up for reelection later this year but seems unlikely to face serious competition.) In the past three years, he has become Brooklyn's most indefatigable promoter. One of Markowitz's earliest stunts was the installation of signs at entry points to the borough saying "How Sweet It Is!" and "Believe the Hype!" and, on the Gowanus Expressway, approaching the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, another sign, reading "Leaving Brooklyn--Fuhgeddaboudit!" (A subsequent attempt to install signs on the Manhattan-bound side of the Williamsburg Bridge reading "Leaving Brooklyn--Oy Vey!" was rejected by the city's Department of Transportation as distracting and uninformative.) Markowitz has also attracted attention less by design than by blunder. After his election, he announced his intention to take down some of the portraits of "old white guys"--former mayors and such--that hung in Borough Hall and replace them with portraits of blacks or women. One of the old white guys was George Washington, and Markowitz's gesture was taken by some to be unpatriotic; others thought it was merely silly, particularly since he had not felt obliged to surrender his own Caucasian electoral ambitions to Jeannette Gadson, the black, female runner-up in the primary for Borough President.

Markowitz has made an art of trading in a familiar nostalgia for better times as a means of promoting the ...