September 14, 1986

TWO years ago, investors from this city's leading financial concerns announced plans to convert a collection of turn-of-the-century commercial buildings into a $20 million apartment and office complex in downtown Greensboro. Those plans were dashed, albeit temporarily, in April 1985, when a fire destroyed much of the project, which downtown boosters had hoped would stem the decline of the center city. But despite the loss of some Federal restoration tax credits, the investors resumed construction, and the first tenants moved into the new project this summer.

Boston College 21

EISENHOWER: AT WAR 1943-1945. By David Eisenhower. Illustrated. 977 pp. New York: Random House. $29.95. FOR David Eisenhower, who was born in 1948, the events he depicts in ''Eisenhower: At War'' are as distant as World War I was to my generation. But Mr. Eisenhower's personal ties to those remote events are uniquely close. His grandfather was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the European Theater of Operations. His father, John Eisenhower, served in the Army in the E.T.O. Both grandfather and father have written notable books about the European war. As a boy, David Eisenhower met Allied leaders - Churchill, Montgomery, Alexander, de Gaulle. One of his favorite spots in the White House was the second-floor room where President Eisenhower displayed his decorations and swords. Though his grandfather rarely discussed military decisions in his presence, David Eisenhower grew up in an atmosphere filled with memories of war. Still, ''Eisenhower: At War'' is not, David Eisenhower tells us, the book he intended to write. He initially envisaged a book about his grandfather's second Presidential term. But he discovered that he could not treat the second term without examining the first term. Eventually he decided that he could not treat the White House years at all without examining the way World War II had prepared Eisenhower for the Presidency. ''Eisenhower: At War'' is, in consequence, the first of three projected volumes on the age of Eisenhower.

While national attention has focused on the elections that will determine which party controls the Senate, political leaders say the Republican Party, remarkably, is likely to avoid any serious losses in the House of Representatives this year. Experts from both parties agree that the Democrats will maintain control of the House but that their chances for dramatic gains are minimal. The analysts are speaking instead of the Democrats' picking up 10 to 15 seats, much less than has often been the case when one party has controlled the White House for six years. The average loss for the President's party has been 48 seats in the last three elections held at such a time: 1974, 1966 and 1958.

A REPORT that found deficiencies in the management of the Suffolk County Police Department has led county officials to discuss steps to modernize the 2,559-member force, one of the nation's largest and best paid. The report found that the department had failed to adjust to the growth and maturity of the county, and tended instead to stick to old ways inappropriate for a large suburban force moving into the next century. The department was reactive, the report said, and failed to adequately plan out its future. But some of the suggestions in the report, which was prepared by a panel from Long Island University and released last month, appear likely to be rejected by County Executive Peter F. Cohalan, who requested the study, and by Police Commissioner DeWitt C. Treder. These include a recommendation that the department would operate more efficiently if police headquarters in Yaphank were moved westward, where the overwhelming majority of residents in the police district live.

BUS riders got a break this month when the county canceled a planned 10-cent fare increase. But officials are not optimistic that the reprieve will last next year. ''I think next year will be a disaster,'' said County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke, referring to the county budget as a whole. ''So I'm not going to promise anything.''

For inveterate film fans, the advent of fall means two things: no more movies with Roman numerals in their titles, until Christmas at least, and the arrival of the New York Film Festival. The festival, which begins on Friday, has been an irreplacable cultural constant in this city since its inception in 1963. If there is a particular character to the 1986 roster, it's in the unusually strong American presence. For the first time in the New York Film Festival's history, both the opening and closing night showcases have been reserved for American films - Jim Jarmusch's ''Down by Law'' as the inaugural event, and Francis Coppola's ''Peggy Sue Got Married'' for the finale.

MARKET STREET, running along high ground above the Hudson shoreline in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is uncharacteristically noisy these days. Jackhammers pound away at the rear and sides of the old Y.M.C.A. building, where a developer is preserving the classic facade to meld it later to a new 66,000-square-foot office building on the site. Two blocks north on Market, tall cranes lift buckets of cement that will form the next floors of a 288-car parking garage and 255-room Wyndham Hotel that is being built shoulder-to-shoulder with the Mid-Hudson Civic Center. It has been a long time since the downtown area was this busy, and indications are that the commotion will not stop soon. Across Market from the Civic Center, work is almost ready to begin on a 77,000-square-foot office building that will adjoin the 100,000-square-foot structure opened two years ago and fully occupied by I.B.M. On the other side of the arena, a block closer to the river, a 60,000-square-foot office building will be started soon, and two smaller office buildings - about 30,000 square feet each - are under way a few blocks south of there.

ASSESSING last week's meeting between President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel, a member of the Israeli delegation remarked that it was the diplomatic equivalent of a souffle - hard and tasty on the surface, but mostly air underneath. The fact that it was short on substance and focused primarily on improving the atmosphere between Egypt and Israel does not mean that the Peres-Mubarak meeting was a failure. During its buildup, the two countries, with a good deal of coaxing from Washington, finally reached an agreement on how to arbitrate the Taba border dispute, thus removing a major thorn from their relationship. Both Mr. Peres and Mr. Mubarak deserve credit for the way in which they were able to maneuver their respective coalitions at home into resolving the Taba issue and paving the way for the return of Egypt's ambassador to Tel Aviv.

THE stock market has long proven to be one of the most reliable predictors of the economic future. But at times it behaves no more rationally than a panic-stricken mob. In the wake of last week's sell-off, in which trading volume for much of Thursday and Friday was a million shares a minute, the question was whether this was one of those prescient markets or one that was mostly just tired and jumpy.

WHEN John Connally's Presidential ambitions were dashed in 1980, he decided, at age 63, that it was time to quit politics and to start making some real money. He looked around his beloved home state of Texas, on the cusp of a fantastic boom in oil and real estate, and saw the opportunity to convert his powerful connections, tall good looks and silver tongue into a Texas-sized fortune. His friend and political protege, Ben F. Barnes, the former Lieutentant Governor of Texas, joined him. And together the men borrowed with abandon to build their empire with a rolling swagger much admired in Texas, and a conviction they couldn't lose. The two men built shopping malls in Houston, Giddings and other oil regions of Texas. They put up a 14-story office building in Houston. They developed an upscale housing subdivision in the lovely hills to the west of Austin, the capital of Texas. They built a 120-unit beachfront condominium and shopping mall on South Padre Island, Tex., a favorate refuge of wealthy Mexicans. They invested in oil and gas wells and a gas pipeline. And they freely signed personal guarantees for loans to pals who were playing the same investment game.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that the Mobil station at 90 Main Street in Westport, Conn., would be demolished. In a downtown commercial strip increasingly dominated by boutiques and other trendy establishments, the gas station was no longer considered by many real-estate investors to be the highest and best use of the land.