# The 13 Greatest New Yorkers of All Time

> Born there, made there, or simply unimaginable anywhere else. The five boroughs have produced an unreasonable number of them.

*By YPB Team · Published August 12, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-13-greatest-new-yorkers-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Theodore Roosevelt**
   Born on East 20th Street, he ran the city's police department before he ran the country.
2. **Alexander Hamilton**
   The immigrant lawyer who built the American financial system from lower Manhattan and is buried at Trinity Church.
3. **Jay-Z**
   The Marcy Houses rapper who turned a Brooklyn childhood into a catalogue and a business empire.
4. **Stan Lee**
   The Manhattan-born writer and editor who co-created most of the Marvel universe from a midtown office.
5. **Jane Jacobs**
   The Greenwich Village writer whose fight against expressways changed how cities everywhere are planned.
6. **Martin Scorsese**
   The Little Italy director who spent a career filming the city's streets from the inside.
7. **Fiorello La Guardia**
   The Depression-era mayor who rebuilt the city's infrastructure and read the funny papers on the radio during a strike.
8. **Andy Warhol**
   The Factory artist who made New York the centre of the postwar art market.
9. **Walt Whitman**
   The Brooklyn newspaperman whose Leaves of Grass gave the city and the country a voice.
10. **Ruth Bader Ginsburg**
   The Brooklyn-born justice who argued her way through sex-discrimination law before joining the Supreme Court.
11. **Duke Ellington**
   The bandleader whose Cotton Club residency and Harlem years defined the city's jazz age.
12. **Robert Moses**
   The master builder who gave the city its parkways and beaches and bulldozed neighbourhoods to do it.
13. **Jean-Michel Basquiat**
   The Brooklyn painter who went from tagging SAMO on downtown walls to the centre of the 1980s art world.

Tags: historical-figures, usa, cities, new york