Seeing shows like "How I Met Your Mother" and "Friends" may get you thinking, ?I'd love to live in Manhattan. It would be so freakin' cool. I'm gonna do it!?

You're right. It is cool. I lived there for a long time. But before you wave goodbye to your folks and friends, check this out. The average price of an apartment in Manhattan is...wait for it...1.2 million dollars. This is just for an OK space. (New Yorkers like to call their places ?spaces.?) Want a two bedroom where Ted and Marshall bonded? The space where Rachel and Monica cooled their high heels? A cool 1.5 million dollars.

When my wife and I were living in Manhattan, we paid a nice piece of change for 700 square-foot rental at...wait for it again...$2,800 a month ? and that was 5 years ago. The place is probably going for $3,100 now. We had a 24-hour doorman and lived on a high floor in a corner space. The elevators worked most of the time. Let me tell ya, though, haulin' six heavy bags of groceries up 22 flights is no picnic.

There are spaces that go for less known as ?rent controlled apartments.? These locales have had family members living in there since, I don't know, the Civil War. These 10 room spaces go for $450 a month and never, I repeat, never are available to anyone outside immediate family members. Kudos to those wrote a ?Friends? episode where someone in the cast says how lucky Monica is to have inherited her digs from her grandma. Man, can you freakin' believe they gave that place up? Oh wait, it's just a TV show ?  but not reality TV, that's for sure!

Want the real story? When I worked at MTV way back when, I visited some of my female colleagues who lived in very hip, very cool Greenwich Village. Three of them lived together ? in a cramped basement apartment ? each room was something like 8'x 8'. And if memory serves, there were two beds in one of the rooms. Now that's reality my friends!

There is an upside to all of this ? you don't need a car to live in Manhattan. Subways, busses, taxi cabs get you around pretty easily, although cabs can drill a hole in your pocket. FYI, if you want to rent a car for a weekend getaway or haul some stuff around, it'll run you about $100, and that would be using every discount available to you. Of course you could buy a car and keep it in a garage for $600 a month ? never mind car payments, insurance (through the roof in the big city) plus a stack of tens to keep the garage attendant happy every time you pop in.

Funny thing is, I'd love to live there again....with good working elevators, of course.