What was going on when I was born?

The Census to Save New York is a project of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in which every structure on the 850,000 building lots in the city is being inventoried. So far, it has been proceeding slowly, with only about 54,000 parcels inventoried in areas such as Manhattan south of 23d Street and west of the Bowery.

A CHALLENGE to a bid by a millionaire general contractor to buy and rejuvenate this resort's mile and a quarter of beachfront will be heard tomorrow in Superior Court in Freehold. The contractor, Henry V. Vaccaro, head of Asbury Park Boardwalk Associates Inc., bid $2.7 million for the city-owned property, which includes Convention Hall but not the Boardwalk. Although the bid has been approved by the five-man City Council and by Mayor Raymond Kramer - who said he saw the project as a chance to give Asbury Park ''a new lease on life'' - formal acceptance has been barred by the court challenge. The action was filed by the heads of two corporations and an apartment-house owner who were precluded from bidding by a City Attorney's ruling.

Neighbors may not appreciate the sight of a boat, truck, car, old washing machine or the like stored in an adjacent backyard, but there is usually nothing they can do about it except to put up a fence. But in Killingworth, Conn., a rural town of 4,000, there is an ordinance prohibiting the storage out of doors of many such common items.

ONE day late last month, John Aristotle Phillips was at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, catching a plane for home after lecturing at several colleges in the Middle West. He heard a bustle, looked up and saw an exhausted Jane Byrne, plodding through a curious crowd toward a plane for Palm Springs, Calif. It was the day after the Mayor of Chicago had lost her party's primary election for renomination. A heckler, Mr. Phillips recalled, shouted at her, ''You ain't the Mayor no more!'' And Mr. Phillips, who has known his own electoral mornings after, could understand how Mrs. Byrne felt. ''She felt, from the look on her face, so bad,'' he said. ''I could empathize with her. I don't like Byrne as a person, but I felt badly for her because people were being unnecessarily cruel - 'You're only as good as your last movie.' ''

Three Central American Governments are planning a meeting to discuss methods of bringing peace to the region and have decided not to invite the United States, according to Government officials here. A Costa Rican official said today that it was hoped the meeting could be held within a few weeks to take advantage of a ''lowering of tensions'' in the region that could follow Pope John Paul II's current visit. The meeting would be held in a neutral country, possibly the Dominican Republic. (In Washington, Thomas O. Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, said the United States was ''not at all'' upset about not being invited to the meeting, adding that the Reagan Administration was ''pleased to see the countries of the region taking responsibilities for the grave problems of the region.'')

Pope John Paul II's visit here Friday has sharpened the political and religious differences between supporters and opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinist Government. As soon as the Pope left for Costa Rica Friday night - he visited Panama today and is due in El Salvador Sunday - pro-Government groups expressed indignation that in five addresses he referred neither to reported efforts by the United States to undermine the revolution nor to the 375 young Sandinists who have been killed by what are called counterrevolutionary bands in the last three years. ''The Pope has sold out to imperialism and to Reagan,'' a Sandinist organizer said angrily. Support for Archbishop Further, the Pope attacked the left-leaning ''People's Church'' - whose members consist of Government supporters who do not necessarily support the church hierarchy - and ordered obedience to the country's bishops. Sandinist groups felt these actions by the Pope were an endorsement of the anti-Government views of Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Managua, whom high-ranking Nicaraguan officials have denounced as a counterrevolutionary.

THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. By Donald Spoto. Illustrated. 594 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $20. HENRY KISSINGER'S favorite movie is Alfred Hitchcock's ''Psycho.'' But his son, David, age 21, is brimming with enthusiasm for Werner Herzog and allusions to R.W. Fassbinder. George Orwell once said that for a writer to be influential he must be read by people under 25 - a principle that would apply doubly to movie makers today since the median age of the entire film-going public is in the low 20's. So that, when it comes to movies, what Henry Kissinger likes doesn't count anymore, whereas what David Kissinger says goes. Henry, of course, is a board member of 20th Century-Fox, and David is not. But perhaps this is just another one of life's inequities.

THE Internal Revenue Service has returned the Feuer Transportation Company's New York State operating license and its Interstate Commerce Commission license. Without the licenses, the trucking company, which has been in business for 50 years, could not legally operate. But unless the I.R.S. is also willing to give back about $189,000 in checks and cash it seized last December - along with all of Feuer's assets - for failure to pay overdue back taxes, the company will not be able to do business, according to Jim Pace, the company's president. Mr. Pace and many of the 50 Feuer employees who lost their jobs as a result of the seizure viewed the return of the licenses as an ''empty gesture'' on the part of the I.R.S., because the company would not be able to operate unless it raised nearly $200,000 to cover operating costs and overdue bills. Mr. Pace said last week that he ''does not expect'' the I.R.S. to return the funds it took. ''I wouldn't accept anything from them,'' Mr. Pace said as he sat behind an empty desk in an office filled with desks and void of people or activity. ''They wanted this property, so it's theirs. They can keep it.'' He said his position was ''not one of foolish pride'' but a personal protest against the conduct of Federal marshals when they shut the company last December and against the way the I.R.S. has handled the situation.

PLANS exist for coping with a nuclear accident at Indian Point, but at the moment, only the operators officially maintain that the preparations are adequate. On Wednesday, hundreds of people will participate in an exercise to simulate some of what would happen if there were a major release of radioactivity, in an attempt to see how far the plants have come in meeting the emergency-preparedness requirement. Whether the plans are finally ready may be of great importance to the two reactors, because members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which wrote the emergency-planning rules, say that their patience with Indian Point is wearing out. The five members of the Commission split in a 3-to-2 vote in December on whether the plants should be shut then because of deficiencies in the emergency plans, and one of the members in the majority said that his approval of continued operation might not extend beyond this March if the drill did not show that outstanding problems had been resolved.

FACED with a worsening state budget deficit, Connecticut's General Assembly began searching last week for an elusive accord on new and higher state taxes that could attract enough votes to be enacted. But after several days of meetings by key legislators and committee hearings on the tax issue, there appeared to be only two immediate conclusions, according to some legislative leaders. Few, if any, of the tax measures are likely to be passed by April 1, the target date set by Governor O'Neill. And whatever tax package eventually emerges from the legislature is likely to be substantially different from the one proposed by the Governor in his budget message last month.

Offstage with Marcel Marceau, it is impossible to get a word in edgewise. The man who helped revive and propagate the moribund art of pantomime almost talks his head off when in private. He can be gabby in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. The torrent of words is understandable from someone who has remained mum on stage for almost 40 years while perfecting what Mr. Marceau calls ''silent acting.'' Absent from Broadway since 1975, he opens Wednesday at the Belasco for a six-week run. The creator of ''Bip'' - the white-faced clown who wears a battered stovepipe hat crowned with a red flower - has, however, crisscrossed the United States 20 times on tours as long as six months and visited every other continent. He has done up to 300 performances a year since Broadway catapulted him to international celebrity in the theatrical season of 1955-56. He repeatedly says that New York, its drama critics and audiences, made him. Above all, Mr. Marceau has carried on a reciprocal love affair with students the world over, from Peking to Poughkeepsie, inspiring a whole generation of whitefaced street mimes beginning in the 1960's. University towns are ''must'' stops on his itinerary.

''I, like almost everyone of my generation, went into the theater because of my exposure to Tennessee. In high school, we did those ridiculous, old-fashioned comedies, and then I got to play Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie,' and it was then I fell in love with theater.'' -Lanford Wilson ''Whenever I despaired of my own work, I thought of his courage in the face of so much pain, and I went back to work. I worked with Tennessee, this genius, and I saw the pain of creation and I saw the fleetingness of success. That's why he's so close to my soul.'' -Jose Quintero ''The reason I'm doing what I'm doing now is because of him. The first play I ever saw and related to was 'Summer and Smoke.' I must have been about 14, and I knew then I wanted to be an actress. Tennessee created a world I felt I knew.'' -Elizabeth Ashley