Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin Page B

shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Developed ten years ago as a middle-income “new town,” Roosevelt Island has become a quiet, family sort of place that one of Blessinger’s fellow residents described to
The New York Times
as “an island of Indiana in the middle of Manhattan.”
    Blessinger was quoted in the
Times
in opposition to a proposed expansion of the development that would include what looked to her suspiciously like luxury apartments. “We’re not against white or black or purple,” she said. “What we’re against is rich people.”
    There. She said it. The rest of us have been pussyfooting around this for years, afraid of being called prejudiced. Not Mrs. B. She could envision the peaceful lanes of her little island jammed with triple-parked stretch limousines waiting in front of restaurants where a plate of spaghetti costs eighteen dollars and change. She could see the day when respectable citizens who have to get up and go to work the next morning would be awakened in the middle of the night by the braying of rich people being dropped off after charity balls: “It was marvelous, darling!” “Wasn’t it marvelous, darling?” “Yes, it was marvelous, darling!”
    Mrs. B. said out loud what the rest of us have been thinking: Those people can ruin a neighborhood lickety-split.
    No, we are not prejudiced. We wouldn’t mind one or two rich people, but these days the supply of them seems inexhaustible. As seems to be true of so many recent developments in American life, this surfeit of richies has come as a surprise to me. When I was growing up, one of the most important things about truly rich people was that there weren’t very many of them. Also, my high school teachers told us that people like the Rockefellers had grabbed their piles before the tax laws made it impossible to amass huge personal fortunes.
    So why have so many people become as rich as the Rockefellers? Is it possible that these rich people know something about the tax laws that my high school teachers didn’t know?
    Most of the rich people are in New York. I don’t care what
Forbes
says about where they live. They’re here. We’ve got Texas rich people and California rich people and Colorado rich people. We’ve got rich people with new money and rich people with old money and rich people whose money just needs to sit in the window for a few days and ripen in the sun. There’s no variety of rich people we don’t have in overstock. New York has more rich people than some cities have people.
    For a while, I thought other places might be sending us their rich people. (“Listen, if Frank down at the Savings and Loan doesn’t quit talking about how many Jaguars he owns, we’re just going to have to put him in the next shipment to New York.”) It even occurred to me that whoever is in charge of these other places might have misread the poem on the Statue of Liberty, which definitely says, “Give me you tired, your
poor.
” People make mistakes.
    Then I realized that the rich people were coming here on their own hook. They are swarming into New York because they want to be with people who are like they are—rich. There are a lot of places around the country, after all, where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might be made light of (“Will you look at that thing old Albert’s got himself? Don’t you figure he must think he’s always on his way to a funeral?”). For all I know, there are places around the country where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might have rocks thrown at him.
    “Send ’em back where they came from,” a taxi driver who was hauling me up the East Side Highway one day said as he struggled to get around a gaggle of limos. He had devised a rich-people repatriation plan that sounded very much like Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift, except that he’d use private jets instead of fishing boats.
    “But that would be prejudiced and