Whichever one of them it was (accounts vary) enticed me to Austin, then a sort of bohemian paradise and still, in my heart, what every military brat must eventually seek--Home.

But he and other tenants of the Henry Street Studios say their bohemian paradise has turned into real estate hell.

The narrator's every move is an attempt to trace her lineage back to the goddesses of the New York School during the Hamptons' golden days, when they were a bohemian paradise, before they became a playground for the nouveau riche.

And the neighborhood's portrayal in everything from the musical "Rent" to the movie "Joe's Apartment," both of which had scenes set at the hip, healthy Life Cafe on Avenue B and 10th Street, is certainly adding to the area's reputation as a low-rent bohemian paradise.

It appears to be a clean, prosperous bohemian paradise where everyone is happy 90 percent of the time; even visitors from big, bad Los Angeles quickly mellow.

It's no longer a finishing school for the upper class or a bohemian paradise for writers and artists.

Iain Stewart was an Ibiza stalwart - so much so that he wrote the first ever Rough Guide to the party island - but its charms began to pall and he set off in search of a new bohemian paradise.

Lichtenstein envisioned something that didn't really exist anywhere: a bohemian, or bourgeois bohemian, paradise where artists lived and worked and mixed with neighborhood folk.

"Every few months there's this fear that it will no longer be everyone's little stretch of bohemian paradise," he said, referring to a recent series of Starbucks scares.