Marty Markowitz Prepares to Leave Office After 12 Years Marty Markowitz, departing Brooklyn borough president, at the annual Borough Hall turkey giveaway this week. If Marty Markowitz's grand entrance at the annual Borough Hall Thanksgiving turkey giveaway this week seemed less sprightly than usual, his wisecracks more muted, his smile less dazzling, well, it was hard to blame him. After 12 years as Brooklyn's borough president and chief cheerleader, Mr. Markowitz is relinquishing what he has repeatedly proclaimed is the only job he ever wanted. Irrepressible, loquacious and comfortably round, Mr. Markowitz, 68, has made himself one of New York City's most popular politicians with a personal touch, always giving the impression that he there is nowhere he would rather be than "Brooklyn, U.S.A.," as he often puts it. Few are the moments when he is not celebrating the borough where he was born, has always lived and plans to die. "I will be in Brooklyn forever," Mr. Markowitz, a Democrat, said in his office on Monday after the turkeys were handed out, pride in his voice as he mused about how the borough of his childhood has become an international symbol of chic. "My final landlord, 99 years from now, is Green-Wood" - the cemetery not far from his brick house in Windsor Terrace. Between now and then, however, Mr. Markowitz's life will be considerably circumscribed. No more smashing the traditional egg cream on the Coney Island Cyclone on opening day. No more parades, cracking jokes through a bullhorn like a carnival barker. No more reminiscing at length about the Brooklyn Dodgers - R.I.P. - which captured Mr. Markowitz's heart as a boy before leaving Ebbets Field for Los Angeles. Actually, there will probably still be plenty of that. Mr. Markowitz is not bashful about saying the idea for the Barclays Center, with its attendant N.B.A. team, the Nets, originated with him. He believes bringing a professional sports team back to Brooklyn more than 50 years after the Dodgers left is his signal accomplishment. But his championing of the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards project, with only a few nods to community concerns including affordable housing, crystallized criticism from those who believed he had been too quick to support developers at the expense of community needs. For someone who peppers speeches with quips about his overfondness for Junior's cheesecake, likes to host Valentine's Day parties for Brooklyn's longest-married couples and calls an African gray parrot named Beep his "son," Mr. Markowitz can be surprisingly polarizing. During the eight-year Atlantic Yards fight, opponents believed Mr. Markowitz was using all his clout to make the plan reality. He once declined to renew the terms of five community board members who had voted for a nonbinding anti-Atlantic Yards resolution. Unwilling to brook criticism, he turned an icy face to those who questioned him, recalled Tom Angotti, a professor of urban planning at Hunter College who opposed the project. Atlantic Yards "was presented as a fait accompli, and the train left the station, you better get on it," Professor Angotti said. He was not only on the train, he was in the front of the train, leading it. And that was a problem. At other times, Mr. Markowitz has been faulted for conducting his career more like a cruise director than a municipal leader. Part of the reason his initiatives - including a boroughwide weight-loss challenge, a summer concert series and an over-40 singles event - can seem light on substance is the nature of the office itself: The borough presidents lost most of their traditional powers after the City Charter was revised in 1990. Mr. Markowitz said on Monday that he hoped to someday see the charter amended to give borough presidents a greater role in land-use issues, and set budgets so that they did not have to rely on the mayor and City Council for allocations. Michael Tobman, a political consultant based in Brooklyn, said of Mr. Markowitz: "He's done more with the office than could've ever been expected in anyone's imagination. At a time when the city was heading in a direction of celebrating wealth and money as the drivers of our economy, he stayed a working-class, middle-class, ethnic stalwart. With his nostalgia for the Dodgers and the Coney Island of yore, Mr. Markowitz can seem an unlikely cheerleader for a place now better known for artisanal coffee than egg creams. But constituents, particularly those not in the gentrified corners of Brooklyn, embrace him for his boosterism and apparent delight in helping them. It is not uncommon for junior city employees to receive calls from him, inquiring after a constituent problem.