In the Brooklyn edition of Monopoly, the deed to Junior’s Restaurant & Bakery costs 220 fake dollars. At the cheesecake chain’s flagship location, on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, the game is on sale for $39.99. My breakfast—two scrambled eggs with American cheese on a roll with home fries, a cup of coffee, a seltzer, and a slice of cheesecake—comes up just shy of that, tip included. In 2014, the owner, Alan Rosen, whose grandfather Harry opened the restaurant in 1950, turned down a $45 million offer to buy the building from JDS Development Group. Two years later, the firm, undeterred, acquired the neighboring Dime Savings Bank and its air rights for $95 million in order to build the Brooklyn Tower, the borough’s first supertall structure. Like its predecessor at 9 Dekalb Avenue, the Tower is literally made of money: Mercury Liberty dimes line the ceiling, a twee reference to the minimum deposit required to create an account when the bank was chartered in 1859.
I, however, am not made of money, which is one of the reasons that I’m eating at Junior’s, and also…