Jane Austen, The Elite's Cheese And What Happened To It

January 22, 2014

     Who Moved My Cheese? is a best-selling business book, an allegory of humans' positive and negative reactions to changes around them.  It comes to mind as I think about my imminent move and the moves friends and others have made and are making in response to the new economy of New York City.

     There was a time when those who attended prep schools and graduated from the Ivy League were New York's Old Guard, an enduring, empowered and affluent, not to say wealthy class, with its own distinct codes.  Anyone who has seen the films of Whit Stillman, Metropolitan in particular, will recognize the caste's defining characteristics.  Whit Stillman is now 61, though, and characters of the milieu his films depicted so knowingly are now of retirement age.

     In 2014, however, their standing is not what it was, as global money flows into New York City and redefines the parameters of what wealth is.  Departures, the magazine of American Express' Platinum cardholders, illustrates the paradigm shift in its latest cover, a comic strip entitled, The Hunt For The $100 Million Apartment, featuring an assortment of well-heeled foreigners for whom price is no impediment to the purchase of their ideal Manhattan apartment.  Even at a less stratospheric level, as buyers from Greenwich, Connecticut, Lambertville, New Jersey and other wealthy areas relocate to New York, the residential real estate market is offering record prices for sellers of apartments that were only intended to house the middle-class of the Upper West Side, not the rich.

     Whether it's on Park Avenue or along Broadway, sales proceed in desirable buildings, and newer, wealthier people move in daily.  Those who choose to remain feel gratified at the associated increase in their apartment's value, while standing pat.  Where would we go if we sold?" is a common lament.  "Once we sell, we'll have to leave New York, because we can't afford to buy anything anywhere we'd like", is another.

      Not everyone is so attached to their well-loved homes, though.  Increasingly, I hear of people from the Old Guard moving to areas that might bespeak "retrenchment", to ungenerous minds.  The word reminds me of Jane Austen's Persuasion, a novel about the difference between "character" and "snobbery" whose message is apropos here.  Sir Walter Eliot, the careless, widowed aristocrat whose profligacy triggers the plot, unbelievingly asks his daughter Elizabeth, “Can we retrench? does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?"  Without "compromising their dignity", they cannot, so they leave the ancestral home for Bath, where Lord Eliot believes he can "be important at comparatively little expense."  For many of us that question is salient, and its answer, "No", compels us to leave the area and the place we called "home", behind.

     So there are partners at Wall Street law firms living in the 120s in West Harlem, antique dealers and Greenwich transplants putting down roots two miles to the north on Sugar Hill, and me, moving to Inwood.  To thrive, we have to abandon the creature comforts we so enjoyed and embark on a voyage along new pathways.

      I'm surprised only that I've so much company, as I always thought those who traditionally enjoyed position and power in the City's toniest circles were immune from the economic winds that have shifted my course.  The "cheese" of the elite of New York --the preppies, the Ivy League grads, has been moved, and those who have left the expensive enclaves have become "pioneers" in neighborhoods their parents wouldn't have visited without a police escort.   

     As the city moves into its next phase, Who Moved My Cheese? and its warnings against complacency, seem apt: Will we New Yorkers of the "urban haute bourgeoisie" (as Whit Stillman calls us) be "Sniff" and "Scurry", the mice who adapt successfully?  Or will we be "Hem", who resists, but eventually learns from his experience.  Or will we be like "Haw", the last of the four, flailing, lost in the maze?