"You're famous below 14th Street," Elliot Sharp told me once, "you just donít know it because you live in Harlem."

Then I'll never know it, I thought to myself. I don't like The Lower East Side anymore. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fun girl. I can have a good time anywhere. To be honest, though, it was over for me when King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut closed. All of a sudden, there was gentrification. Everybody got hip, everything got pricey and everyone I knew that was cool either left the neighborhood because they couldn't afford it anymore or stayed because, thanks to rent control or home ownership, they could. Now it looks like an extension of NYU's campus, for the most part. Property is the name of the game. Some of its most famous spaces are, quite literally, being converted into dormitory and classroom space-- like CBGB's of all places and The Bottom Line, if you can believe that. NYU is buying up downtown and Columbia University is quietly trying to eat Harlem.

What am I saying. Everyone wants to eat Harlem. A lot of real estate developers are buying dilapidated buildings and they're leaving them that way, so they can sell them to the highest bidder at the most appropriate moment. And if you think that the stress of living in the ghetto (which includes having to see all of that degradation every day) isn't destroying us from the inside out, you're woefully misinformed. The real estate folks are getting fat while the people who live here are just getting by. And yup. That includes me.

Maybe the real reason why The Lower East Side creeps me out is because it might be what my beautiful West Harlem neighborhood will look like in 8 to 10 years.

What is gentrification, anyway? Or, more importantly, is there anything that I can do about it? I'm not sure. All I really know is, I'd better buy a house up here and soon, before there aren't any left.