Great article by Jay McInerney on the the wane of the UES, rich people habits and New York society, which apparently is NOT a term that anyone outside of society call themselves. (They call themselves “social people.”) It’s in the same vein as the Vanity Fair zombie banker article, which leads me to believe that whenever NYC starts to suck, everyone blames it on the bankers. (Rampant crime? Damn those Masters of the Universe!!! — Fast fwd 20 years — NYC is too sterile, too boring, too many high rises, you say? You know who to blame … those rich muthaf—ers!) Enough commentary, just read and enjoy–

On the origins of the UES:

Over the course of the next twenty years [1930s], grand apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue and Park redefined the concept of the good life. In a city that was still chaotic and dangerous, the western half of the Upper East Side, with its broad avenues and its doorman-guarded buildings, represented the equivalent of a gated community for the childbearing wealthy, with Central Park as the ultimate backyard. From that day down to the present, an apartment in one of several dozen buildings built before 1930—the number of “good buildings” is generally agreed to be 42—was necessity for status-conscious New Yorkers, as well as for those who had made their pile in Kalamazoo or Caracas and wanted to plant their flag at the center of the world. At least until recently.

On where society lets it all hang out –

Still later, you will see many faces from the antiques show at Swifty’s, the modest little bistro that has replaced Mortimer’s as the canteen of the tribe. At Swifty’s, as at ‘21,’ people who fly in front of the plane or in private planes happily dine shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl in a space that resembles a subway car at rush hour. … [A]nd when they eventually head for the front door close to eleven, it’s like watching the clowns pour out of a Volkswagen—very expensively dressed, heavily bejeweled, late-middle-aged clowns, many of whom have their own chauffeured cars waiting outside although their apartments are only steps away. “There go the antique people,” says a young banker at my table. It takes him a moment to realize he’s cracked a joke.

When downtown became safe …

If a single precipitating event can be pinpointed, the beginning of the end for the Upper East Side might be John Kennedy Jr.’s taking up residence in Tribeca. …If that defection could be explained away as an act of impetuous youth, there were others that could not, like Diane Von Furstenberg’s 1997 move from the Carlyle to a townhouse on far West 12th Street

On why New York is boring (and Tribeca is the richest zip code in the U.S.)…

Now that hedge-fund managers and trust-funders have taken over Tribeca, the former province of painters and sculptors, it may be that Manhattan geography is no longer destiny, that neighborhoods have lost their tribal signification.

All of which is a long way of saying that rich people are often boring. Question: if UESiders move downtown and downtown types move to Brooklyn, where do all the black people and hasidic jews go?

P.S. BBalle loves Jay McInerney. (Do the Bolivian March. Repeat.)