Behind the Velvet Rope

Not long ago, the super rich of New York were a knowable entity. There were so few of them, they were the Guggenheim or the Rockefeller... We knew who they were, what company they owned, or where their family had made all its money. And that's as far as it went. Mostly, they stayed out of our way;  the super rich were one minuscule subculture in a city that had better things to worry about. But somewhere along the line, as great torrents of cash came pouring into Manhattan, it stopped being possible to ignore them as an the average two-bedroom apartment now costs $1.2 million!