September 29, 1983

The New York Jets have rejected the city's offer for a new lease at Shea Stadium and, beginning next year, will play their home games at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, Mayor Koch announced yesterday. The Mayor made the announcement at an unusual City Hall news conference where he and other city officials made frequent derisive references to Leon Hess, the Jets' owner. They said their inability through six months of on-and-off negotiations to persuade Mr. Hess to stay in New York was not a result of financial considerations. The city, they contended, had offered enough incentives so that the team would fare no better by moving to New Jersey. The officials said they learned of Mr. Hess's decision Monday. Mr. Koch said he believed that Mr. Hess was moving because of an ''emotional matter'' between Mr. Hess and M. Donald Grant, the former chairman of the board of the Mets, the baseball team that is the primary tenant at Shea Stadium.

A House subcommittee approved legislation today that would spare residential telephone customers a long-distance ''access fee'' scheduled to start Jan. 1 but would let the new charge take effect for business customers. The complex bill, approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications by a 10-to-5 vote, would also establish a Universal Service Fund intended to assure that poor people and those living in rural areas would not lose their telephones because of the sharply increasing rates expected in the next few years. A spokesman for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company said the company was ''dismayed by the House action'' because it seemed ''to create chaos out of order.''

An article Sept. 10 on the Center for Investigative Reporting misidentified the center's former executive director and a founder of the center.

IT looks like a furniture bestiary: lizards inhabiting a forest of leaves on the front of a chest; drawer fronts of triangulated fish with tiny knobs for eyes; a wriggle of snakes climbing up toward a clear- glass tabletop; leopards meeting nose to nose and insinuating their cat grace the length of a sofa. The creatures are the work of the furniture maker Judy Kinsley McKie, and most of them can be seen at the Elements Gallery, 90 Hudson Street, where a show of her work will continue through Oct. 8. When Mrs. McKie began making her first chairs and couches to furnish her apartment in the late 1960's she started with the most basic - simple, angular, undecorated modern furniture. The animals evolved gradually from the hand of this self-taught carpenter.

A report in the Debt Issues listing of Business Day on Tuesday misidentified the lead underwriter for a Eurobond financing by Comsat International N.V. It is Credit Suisse First Boston.