Yet a generational shift is under way: A growing number of Scarsdale alumni in their thirties are not only acknowledging their roots but replanting themselves in the same soil. (It's not just Scarsdale -- anecdotal evidence suggests the same is happening all over the tri-state area; products of Tenafly, Darien, and Great Neck are all going back to their hometowns.) After delaying marriage and children, they've also come around on the suburbia question, retracing the sidewalks to their own success, hoping to ensure the same for their children.

"I spent the first half of my life trying to get out of Scarsdale," says Michael Iver, 38, a derivatives marketer at another Wall Street firm, "and the second half trying to get back in."

Some admit feeling conflicted -- are they throwing in the towel, shunning culture and diversity, making the safe, retrograde choice? -- but many seem to have simply concluded that their parents were right.

Rippy Philipps is decidedly one of the latter; four years ago, he purchased a $645,000 split-level ranch house with a pool, and volunteered to coach football -- as a childless bachelor. In fact, he held off proposing to his wife, he says, because he first "wanted to make sure she was comfortable with Scarsdale."

Less zealous ex-residents who've circled back to the nest are surprised, and comforted, to learn how many others have done the same. Recently, Kim Schlesinger Meyers ('80) reports, she was shopping with a friend in the Scarsdale branch of Hay Day -- a picture-perfect, pricey grocery boutique -- and she bumped into four fellow returnees in five minutes. Her friend, who grew up on Long Island, finally asked, "What is it, do you all come back here?"

When Jeff Perry ('78), a principal at a hedge fund, moved back two years ago from York and 72nd, he discovered that "the train platform was a mini high-school reunion every day." Then, planning his twentieth reunion, he found that of his 400 classmates, 25 had moved back. When I called the local real-estate-brokerage firm, Julia B. Fee, for further evidence, the agent who answered the phone, Sheila Stone, volunteered that a colleague had just sold two houses to returnees -- "She said she's driving around showing houses to kids she used to carpool" -- and that Stone's own two sons had moved back. "Where do you live?" she inquired, somewhat accusatorially.

In the course of reporting, I amassed the names of 150 people who'd graduated between the late sixties and the mid-eighties and who'd returned, including numerous intra-Scarsdale marriages and several instances of people who'd bought their parents' house. Returnees are coaching and teaching at the high school, running the train-station coffee shop and the limo service, hawking wine at Zachys, brokering local real estate, installing security systems, editing the town newspaper, and supervising a firm that specializes in teardowns of local houses to build so-called McMansions.

Staying put may be the norm in rural areas, company towns, and the city, but New York suburbia has not traditionally inspired that kind of brand loyalty. It's too close to Manhattan to develop its own culture; instead it functions as a large playpen that shields commuters' progeny from the larger world (not from drugs, alcohol, or sex, of course, but at least from getting into real trouble for them). The suburb is analogous to a convenience store: Everything you'd want is in one overpriced place, but you wouldn't necessarily want to hang out there.