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THREE years ago, Sandy Taggart took Ken Allen to see a neighborhood that she had liked when she worked there decades before, but as if in a dream, could barely remember how to find. He liked the neighborhood -- Crown Heights, Brooklyn -- as much as she did, and they bought a 1905 three-story town house there for $840,000. The old house is spacious and airy. There's a painting studio for Ms. Taggart, an artist, off the entry hall, and a rear apartment that one of her three sons rents with his girlfriend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THESE days, Hoyt Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is a stylish strip, with boutiques like Layla, which sells jewelry and textiles, and GRDN, the upscale trove for urban gardeners. Michelle Williams famously lived here with Heath Ledger. Margaret and Frank Cusack never imagined this kind of transformation back in 1973 when they paid $49,500 for their four-story 22-foot-wide Hoyt Street brownstone. The neighborhood was scary then, with blocks the couple wouldn't walk down. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN strangers approach, there's a fierce bark behind the closed door of the Blitz family's 1899 American Foursquare house in Kensington, Brooklyn. But on close inspection, the dog, Magda, turns out to be just 10 inches tall, and pretty enough to be carried around in a socialite's Louis Vuitton bag. ''She's a Can Hardly,'' said Dori Dietz Blitz. Meaning the family can hardly tell what kind of dog she is. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BALLET shoes are piled on top of a cupboard near the bed in Nicola Curry's 525-square-foot Upper West Side studio apartment. Pilates workout equipment clutters a corner. Two paintings of dancers left by the apartment's previous owner hang on a bathroom wall. On a kitchen cabinet a Post-it note is covered with tiny letters: Proverbs 3:5,6: ''Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.'' The straight-backed Miss Curry, 22, sits on an inflatable exercise ball, instead of a chair, at her minuscule round dining table, facing a photograph of Picasso on the kitchen wall. He's wearing a striped shirt and has spread out little loaves of bread on the tabletop in front of him. They look like fingers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]