June 1, 1986

NOT long ago, politicians could get an easy headline by railing against the ''damp dens'' of radicals and scofflaws living on Lake Union. But high moorage fees and protective city legislation have now driven out all but a handful of the colorful Bohemian types who contributed to the singular reputation of this city's houseboat community, one of the largest in the country. ''Houseboats are now very fashionable,'' said James Fearn, a Seattle city attorney who monitors a new floating-home rent-control law. ''When people with more money compete for a fashionable commodity with people with less money, one side always wins.''

As ritual has it, the 1985-86 New York theater season is officially over tonight, when the Broadway establishment hands out its Tony Awards on television. If the Tony winners and losers seem beside the point, it's not completely Broadway's fault. The world became a stage in the season's waning weeks, with a gruesome vengeance that might upstage any play. One could well feel silly and irrelevant going about one's business attending the theater while the front pages screamed of terrorism, of nuclear disaster, or the willful forgetting of the past by the man who would be president of the country where Hitler was born. In such a civilization - or absence of same - does one stay home to watch the late-breaking news and brood, or go off to see the most profusely nominated Tony contender, ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood''?

THE solitude was disturbed only by the familiar click-clack of cleated shoes on pavement and clinking of silverware in the clubhouse restaurant, sounds indigenous to a golf course and compatible with the buzzing and chirping that nature does on the fairways. Among the games that people play, golf is more like shooting the rapids or mountain climbing than hitting a baseball or making a basket, for it focuses on overcoming a number of hazards, natural and manmade. So weekend duffers and professionals alike have come to view golf not just as a game, but sometimes, a matter of survival. And during the difficult moments when the ball is playing hide-and-seek in the tall grass or communing with the fish in a lake, golfers cannot easily be persuaded to appreciate esthetics. At times like these, they are convinced that men such as Robert Trent Jones, who has built so many of these 18-hole picture postcard settings, and Mother Nature, who provides the raw materials, are equal partners in a conspiracy to embarrass them.

ONE of the most dramatic moments in a murder trial occurs when the prosecution shows pictures of the bloodied victim. The sobering tableau - the dead body, the family quietly sobbing in the courtroom - gives the jurors something to ponder as they weigh the evidence in the case. Last week, at the Baltimore trial of Ronald W. Pelton, a former intelligence official charged with espionage, the prosecutors tried to show the jury a picture of the victim, the national security. But it was a photograph taken from a great distance, and the Government's difficulties in laying out its case illustrated the dilemmas faced by the state in virtually all espionage trials.

At first a parochial elementary school, later considered as the site for a disco, the burned-out building stood vacant at the corner of East 30th Street and Third Avenue for more than a decade. The site lies between the Murray Hill and Gramercy Park areas.