Illustration by Jean Jullien

Downtown Brooklyn is set to get a lot lot more Manhattan-like in the next few years: Among other residential towers underway, there’s the 57-story Avalon Willoughby West, and the 52-story Hub on Schermerhorn Street. But when developers offered Junior’s owner Abe Rosen $45 million (which would have been the largest per-square-foot price in Brooklyn history) for the restaurant’s original location, he didn’t immediately jump at the fortune. After talking to his wife, father, customers, and therapist, Rosen decided that serving cheesecake is more important than getting dough.