Brooklyn "power couple" Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany are leaving the neighborhood. Their beautiful Prospect Park West mansion (see pic, above) is on the market for $8.5m (they paid $3.5 for it back in 2003). They'll be fleeing to a fancypants penthouse in TriBeCa. So, is everyone going to just abandon Brooklyn? First it was Michelle Williams and the late Heath Ledger (though she kept their Boerum Hill brownstone, she spends most of her downtime in LA, he spent it in Manhattan), and now these well-respected "boho" "artists." Thank God we've still got Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Keri Russell. And I think M.I.A. lives somewhere in Bed-Stuy. But, they'll probably leave too.

As Brooklyn gets less trendy and more mainstream (and more expensive), the hip young celebrities, flush with a little bit of money, will choose more convenient places to live. It used to be something of a tip of the hat for a rich famous person to move to the borough. "Aren't we shy and intelligent!" "We're just like you!" That kind of thing. But now all sorts of people live out here and there's no gesture or identity associated with "brownstone Brooklyn" anymore. If they moved to Crown Heights, that'd be something! But, they won't. They'll go for ease and (though they'd never admit it) status. And then we'll just be left with a bunch of boring old writers, who actually spend time in the neighborhood and clog up the streets. More pictures of the Connelly/Bettany manse at Curbed.