Still thinking about that $7 water.

Maybe you really can't go home again. Or maybe home isn't where you think it is. Or maybe as you get older you need trees. Any tree. And a little grass underneath it. That may be it.

A bar called The Tenement. The Tenement Bar. Sheesh.

The Big Shmapple used to be quaint. Now it's chic. There used to be ethnic neighborhoods in Manhattan. Now, the Italians all live in Brooklyn, the Jews are on Long Island and the ethnic group in charge is Young Hipsters.

Happy, smiling Young Hipsters lining up to rent apartments in Harlem, in Hell's Kitchen, in Alphabetville. Avenue C is 'happening.' Bed-Stuy is probably next, followed by the South Bronx, and then Attica.

Your misfortune is someone else's Theme Park. Perhaps the Tenement Bar Corp. will open another one. They could call it Typhoid. They could serve kooky cocktails like The Konsumption.

Sure, the old Avenue C was atrocious, dangerous, filthy. Now it's hip. The National Treasure's friend was knifed to death on her doorstep in front of her children, while trying to open her door on Avenue C to bring in her groceries. Why would anyone rhapsodize over that neighborhood's previous squalor?

Maybe pushing the Puerto Ricans and the Jews and all the artists and the drug dealers and mom-and-pop shops (some of them drug dealers) into another borough improves Avenue C. It's certainly not scary there anymore. A cup of tea costs $2.75.

But The Great Plotnik loves Italian food and Jewish food and Puerto Rican food. He doesn't like Young Hipster food. Not at these prices. That $7 bottle of water is still galling him.

If he ever moved back here he'd go straight to Brooklyn. Maybe he'd live under the Williamsburg Bridge where he got robbed in his taxicab in 1972. Maybe he'd take a flat in that freaky building in East New York into which he chased the junkie who had run out of his cab without paying. Oooh, Plottie was a foolish youngster sometimes.

The streets weren't even paved in East New York then. You can probably get a studio there for under $2,500 a month now.

These young kids living in these neighborhods don't need any more thieves. They're getting robbed already. This city used to feel like the Heart of Soul. Now...$7 water?