Among the wealthy on the Upper East Side, fewer are buying $190 an ounce caviar.

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

New York City’s neighborhoods are a patchwork of tribes, each with its own standards about manners and the flaunting of wealth. Chatting openly about an inheritance in a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or bantering with buddies in a pizzeria in Park Slope, Brooklyn, about making more than a million dollars would be grounds for social exile. But the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a different story.

This is a neighborhood where, until recently, it was commonplace for bankers to boast into their cellphones about their bonuses. Spike-heeled ladies clacked along avenues swinging designer shopping bags. Developers could sell speculative shells of unfinished five-bedroom condos. Its residents prided themselves that they were surrounded by the trappings of wealth: American Express black cards, dexterous plastic surgeons and preened pooches.

But the Upper East Side has been served a dose of humility recently as its residents have watched their wealth slip away. Their chatter about bonuses has been replaced with gripes about severance agreements. Their investments have been wiped out by collapsed hedge funds and Ponzi schemes, often run by their neighbors.

Even the neighborhood’s coveted coops and town homes have lost their luster. The number of homes sold there dropped by 45 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2008, according to the brokerage firm Halstead Property. And the shopping spree has ended; residents cannot stroll down Madison Avenue without discovering another closed boutique.

“People have been sadder on the Upper East Side. Life in general is much quieter. Everything is more subdued,” said Michele Kleier, a resident who owns a real estate brokerage firm. Since her beloved cafe Petak’s closed, she has been trying to help keep other restaurants open by eating in the neighborhood rather than venturing downtown. “I walk past my favorite restaurants and look into them and make sure they don’t close,” Ms. Kleier said. “We want things to survive.”

Local businesses are noticing in small ways that their customers are trimming budgets. Louis Balducci, a partner in the specialty food market Agata & Valentina, says customers are buying fewer highend items like pate, caviar, foie gras and smoked salmon. They now fill their shopping baskets with chicken rather than steak. They have cut their pastry budgets and pick up “one cupcake instead of two,” Mr. Balducci said.

Residents have eliminated much of the splurging that many local shop owners depended on for business. Leslie Edelman, owner of the Tiny Doll House shop, has noticed that when parents come in to buy brownstone and Victorian-style dollhouses, they now want to spend $500 to $600, not the $1,800 to $2,400 they spent before the recession. Instead of hearing parents disregard costs when decorating the dollhouses, he hears more customers share their fears of losing their jobs. “Sometimes you ask, ‘Where did everybody go?’ ” Mr. Edelman said. “The impulse buying has disappeared.”