Marty Markowitz was strolling in Vienna when he noticed mannequins in a shop window wearing hats emblazoned with Paris, London and Brooklyn. The store had plenty of London and Paris models. Brooklyn was sold out.

“They said they couldn’t restock the Brooklyn hats fast enough,” said Markowitz, 69, who spent 12 years as president of New York City’s most populous borough before retiring in January.

Brooklyn’s cachet as a global brand and epitome of urban hipsterdom is shifting New York City’s center of gravity, reducing the supremacy of Manhattan across the East River and exerting more influence on New York’s political, economic and cultural life. It’s creating jobs and adding residents at a faster pace than any other borough, sparking a boom in commercial development to supply the new masses.

“When we started the Zagat Guide in 1982, we listed about 25 Brooklyn restaurants, and now we list 261,” said Tim Zagat, co-founder of the survey. “Brooklyn was scary 20 years ago. Now it’s the hottest part of the city.”

In the second half of the 20th century, Brooklyn was a symbol of urban decay from which middle-class taxpayers fled for the suburbs, escaping a downward spiral symbolized by the 1957 move of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team to Los Angeles.

JPMorgan Move

Today’s Brooklyn presents a different story. The borough that recorded 158,000 major crimes in 1990 had fewer than 36,000 last year, an 80 percent drop. The Barclays Center, a 19,000- seat arena that opened in 2012 near the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is home to the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets, the first major sports franchise in the borough since the Dodgers left. JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. lender, said in February it would move 2,000 employees nearby.

“Brooklyn has been the leader in job creation, and it’s been widespread across the sectors -- education, health, business services, media and technology,” said James Brown, principal economist for the state Labor Department.

Private-sector jobs in Brooklyn increased 26 percent between 2003 and last year, to 503,572 from 401,071, the biggest percentage gain among the five boroughs in the past decade, according to Labor Department data. By comparison, Manhattan jobs rose 13 percent in the same period, to almost 2 million from 1.75 million.

Brooklynite Mayor

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