People from Brooklyn are used to “scrapping their way,” Perlman said. He elaborated: “There’s a creativity that’s required. There’s just not a lot of rest. You run into walls a lot — you need to come up with a lot of audibles, to use as sports term. Like, OK, this was the plan today, but that’s not going to happen. The train is down. OK, I got to switch to the bus. There are curveballs thrown every day.”

Ms. Woodson noted that even the way Brooklynites speak is an asset for working in politics: “We’re able to be in rooms with lots of people talking at once and follow all the conversations,” she said. “I’m finding that as I travel the country, people don’t do that. People have a hard time with that. I really feel like in Brooklyn, we can do it, and not only do it across different people speaking, but different people’s ways of speaking.”

Brooklynites, said photographer Russell Frederick, , “have their own unique swagguu” — a term close to swagger, but said with Brooklyn swagger. In fact, he suggested it be spelled with an extra u.

Frederick, whose lens has documented residents of Brooklyn for decades, said that Schumer who has an apartment in Park Slope and Jeffries who lives in Prospect Heights have received a certain local schooling. “It’s not just that they are educated,” he said. “When you’re from Brooklyn, you’re street smart. And you can be book smart. With that, you know how to navigate any circle and you’re not intimidated by nobody or anything. You made it through the ’s? You made it through the ’s? Listen. You Teflon. You can go into Beirut, you can go into a war in Congo, in the Middle East.”

That Brooklyn is producing powerful political figures is absolutely not surprising to Brooklynites. In addition to Jeffries and Schumer, they include Mayor Eric Adams who was born in Brooklyn but grew up mainly in Queens and Attorney General Letitia James.

“It’s no coincidence that the mayor of New York City, the New York State attorney general and now potentially the House Democratic leader all herald from Central Brooklyn — a community with a strong sense of Black self-identity and self-determination that has reverberated here for generations,” Tayo Giwa and Cynthia Gordy Giwa, filmmakers and co-creators of Black-Owned Brooklyn, wrote in an email. “That confidence has allowed many people from Central Brooklyn to ascend to extraordinary heights.”

With pride, they added, “There is something special about this place.”

Rosen, the owner of Junior’s, agreed, and said while he was not political, Jeffries is “a great customer.” Jeffries is known to send colleagues a Junior’s cheesecake each holiday season.