OMG Rich People Are Now Going Below 59th Street

New York's upper crust is struggling with the age-old existential question, “Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?”

According to the New York Times, the "gaggles of Muffys and Thurstons" of the Upper East Side are going with the downtown apartments. Obviously. Affairs and divorces are tres passe, darling. What else does one do above 59th Street?

“Downtown is livelier — we feel as though we have been in Milan for the weekend,” Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum, a founder and chairwoman of the Child Mind Institute and a trustee of Lincoln Center Theater, told the Times.

The Times notes that Muffy and Thurston and their other ridiculously named friends are displacing the "flocks of young New Yorkers who might once have lived in the East Village," but are now forced to live in the Times' favorite neighborhood: Williamsburg. In the meantime, those Williamsburg hipsters are being pushed out to Bushwick. (Or was it up the Hudson?).

And the downtown exodus has women shedding their inhibitions! Shedding their diamonds!

“You can go out to dinner and you don’t have to be dressed,” Linda Lambert, wife of the chairman of a commercial brokerage firm — who also shed her townhouse for a TriBeCa loft — said. “You don’t have to wear jewelry."

[NYT, image via Shutterstock]