Many seem to have grown up on the fringes of the rich - private schools, a well-heeled neighborhood - but never to have been rich themselves.

The surge in discontent can be traced back about three years, when Mr. Klein exempted 200 top schools from the uniform curriculum - many with largely white enrollments in relatively well-heeled neighborhoods.

With five small shops sprinkled around the West Village, Marc Jacobs has established a real presence in this well-heeled neighborhood.

There are corner florists with clients rich enough to encourage remarkable displays of rare ripe seasonal blooms, and there is a clock repair, a by-appointment barbershop, two bookshops, and little restaurants with clever names and luminous dining rooms where the well-heeled neighborhood convenes attractively at night.

With all the fireworks, New Yorkers assumed that a second Trader Joe's wasn't far behind, probably in a hip and well-heeled neighborhood like the Upper West Side or SoHo.

Meanwhile Les Ports - where there is no hotel, movie house or disco - is known as an annex of the 16th arrondissement, the most fashionable, well-heeled neighborhood in Paris.

But the discrepancy is really about class, not race: many of the top schools are in well-heeled neighborhoods like the Upper West Side in Manhattan; Park Slope, Brooklyn; and Bayside, Queens.

The urbane little dining room, with its pastoral mural of the four seasons by Paul Davis, had been a retreat and a refuge for its well-heeled neighborhood and its well-heeled clientele, including many fashion folks, since its opening in 1984.

Each day he felt less like some sort of permanent tourist as he strode through the well-heeled neighborhood called Strivers Row.

His H line of men's and women's suits, blazers and boldly striped shirts was not successful in department stores, he conceded, but it did sell well in the company's two stand-alone specialty stores in Manhattan's SoHo and a Westchester mall, so he said he would build more in well-heeled neighborhoods.