
“At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.”
Necessity for a Promenade Drive. Compare: "I want you to see Peel, Stanley, Graham, Sheil, Russell, Macaulay, Old Joe, and soon. They are all upper-crust here." Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Sam Slick in England, 2 Chap., xxiv.; "Those families, you know, are our upper-crust,—not upper ten thousand", James Fenimore Cooper, The Ways of the Hour, chapter vi. (1850).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)