No raw-milk cheese, but saves you the plane ticket

The pictures below demonstrate the utter uselessness of leaving Madison Avenue in search of the more upscale parts of Paris. The stores are the same, the cafes are sometimes the same, and--since I didn't want to violate their privacy, you'll just have to take my word for this--the people look more or less the same. Thin women with tasteful makeup and jewelry, with sweaters draped over their shoulders, accompanied by businessmen who look too classy to deal with, well, business. It's more than designer stores and wealthy pedestrians, though. Oak Street in Chicago offers the same clothing as do Parisian (and Madison Avenue) equivalents, but you never forget that you're in Chicago. (I've tried to do this--walking down Oak Street and imagining it wasn't Chicago--but it doesn't work. It could be that the people look different, but it's far more likely to have something to do with how damn clean downtown Chicago is.)

Does this make the Upper East Side a Paris-themed amusement park? Is there something magical about Paris that cannot be replicated in the crass USA, where people work long hours, turn away carbohydrates, and, if no one's looking, wear sneakers with their suits? Or, leaving aside the difference in pastry and cheese quality, in language, and the relative cheapness of the American GAP and Parisian Petit Bateau, are the two cities, or at least parts of each city, sufficiently equivalent that it's hardly worth traveling as a tourist from, say, Carnegie Hill to the 16th Arrondissment? I was awed by Paris when studying there last fall, but that was after a long summer in Hyde Park, Chicago. Then I got back to the States, to New York, and started to wonder if I might as well have just studied abroad in the East 70s or 80s. The cultural differences exist, but if an alien from another planet were asked to tell apart correspondingly posh neighborhoods in Paris and NYC...