The new crowd is people like Vincent Archer, the 26-year-old son of Detroit's mayor. Archer, a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers who also runs a networking party for buppies called Black Diamonds, is paying $1,100 a month for a floor-through on West 127th Street. "It feels good to be part of this resurgence," he says, "and I know many young people, not just African-Americans, who want to come to Harlem."

To appeal to future Archers, this summer ground will be broken at Fifth Avenue and 116th Street for Harlem's first "smart apartment building," 128 condos wired with T1 lines. Columbia, long an indifferent neighbor, is now offering forgivable $15,000 loans to employees who buy homes in Harlem.

"The people who we're seeing now were looking in Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope ten years ago," says Willie Kathryn Suggs, one of Harlem's best-connected brokers and easily its fastest-talking. "But once the prices jumped, they jumped even higher there than they have in Harlem. So Harlem winds up being the cheapest place you can get a whole house for no money, and rising prices bring a different breed of buyer." Suggs has an elastic definition of "no money": Her firm did the record-setting $660,000 deal for Philmore Anderson.

Besides the unfettered market, the other force that's shaking up the neighborhood is a frenzy of city- and state-sponsored residential construction. Walk down Frederick Douglass Boulevard in the West 120s, and your step falls into rhythm with the pounding of dozens of craftsmen's hammers. Since 1994, the city has installed 10,000 people in new Harlem homes. Last month, the city's Housing Preservation and Development agency, in a partnership with the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz mosque, cut the ribbon at the $16.5 million Malcolm Shabazz Gardens on West 117th Street, opening the doors of 41 low-rise limestone-and-brickface three-family homes with subsidized mortgages.

"People forget now what the Upper West Side was or what Park Slope was in the late sixties," says Jerilyn Perrine, first deputy commissioner of HPD. "They were very different places than they are today, and Harlem shares a lot of the same characteristics. Harlem now has the ability to establish itself as the premier place to live in Manhattan. When we're looking back from 2030, this will be viewed as a pivotal time."

Yet all the uncritical boosterism rarely admits any of the complexities of the new boom, things that don't show up on a monthly mortgage statement. Outside the pockets of old-line stability, hundreds of acres of vacant land function only as spacious dog runs. Huge blocks of vacant buildings stand dormant; after sundown, the empty tenements, with their plywood-filled windows, look like nightmarish Advent calendars.

Many middle-class, long-term residents find themselves blindsided by the new price structure and are resentful. All the old problems haven't vanished, either. Four years ago, Geoffrey and Nancy Ewing bought a brownstone on 143rd Street near Broadway, and the TV actors and their three kids are still waiting for the vaunted crime crackdown to reach their corner of the 30th Precinct. "My theory," Geoffrey Ewing says, "is that when the white people move in, then the cops will start cleaning this place up. It happened in Brooklyn, it happened in some parts of Harlem, and it's gonna happen here. White people in danger! Send out the cavalry!"

Ewing laughs at the image, but some people are uneasy. Race and real estate are the two most fraught topics in this city, and they're overlapping in complex new ways uptown. "Do these interviews in ten years, and Harlem might not be an African-American neighborhood," says Sydney Kai Inis, a designer who lives on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard at West 116th Street. "In 2010, Harlem might be the Fort Greene of Manhattan. Hopefully, more African-Americans who have the means will come to Harlem and buy, because that would be a hard pill to swallow."

The color that's producing the tensest moments, however, isn't white but green. As in money.
Vesta Callender steps down from the front passenger seat of a gleaming Ford van and into her past. "Look to your right, and you'll see 226 West 138th, where at one time I lived," Callender says. "I was in college, going to Hunter, a brave adolescent who left home and rented space."

The scent of a sweet business deal is what has brought her back to Striver's Row. She's an African-American psychotherapist who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. "I said I would return to Harlem when they had a Starbucks," Callender says, "and now they do." Her comportment, however, is more high-tea than mochaccino. She recoils when invited to step inside a glorious burned-out wreck on West 130th Street.

Leading Callender and her thirtysomething daughter, Jillian, on a tour today is Realtor Yvonne Maddox, whose midtown-based firm, Charles H. Greenthal, recently opened an office steps from the Apollo Theater. Maddox stands in the middle of West 138th Street narrating an architectural history. "Striver's Row has held its value through the years," she says. "You're in the shadows of City College here, and many surrounding blocks are now considered livable -- "