February 18, 1990

LEAD: Four weeks after troops swarmed into this seaside city to suppress a nationalist uprising, the most popular excursion for classes at local schools is the hilltop park where the city has buried its dead.

LEAD: The Claremont Riding Academy, a fixture on the Upper West Side for nearly a century - it stables 100 horses and serves almost 50,000 riders a year - has been rescued from the knacker and will undergo an extensive rehabilitation with the help of the city's Industrial Development Agency.

LEAD: For the better part of 25 years, I felt discontented with teaching in America. This is not a country that reads much, or believes that the little it is required to read has anything to do with the world of banks, cars and missile silos. We are practical to a fault, clean mental machines, so Thoreau, Whitman and Mark Twain go in one ear and pass out the other, frequently without impediment, loss of speed or any notable effect.

LEAD: The Cross & Brown Company, a New York real estate brokerage and property management concern, has agreed to sell its residential division to Douglas Elliman-Gibbons & Ives, a Manhattan residential brokerage. Officials of both companies, who declined to disclose the purchase price, said one effect of the sale would be the transfer of 31 brokers from seller to buyer.

LEAD: AS the county's cultural institutions try to increase their audiences, programs put together with the whole family in mind are becoming more common. ''The trend toward family programming is widespread, although no one is teaching it or advocating it, and there has been no major conference on this,'' said Christopher P.

LEAD: After a decade of war, economic crisis and political polarization, Nicaraguans will vote in eight days in this country's first free and broadly contested democratic election. But because most voters, wary of such freedom, remain deeply reluctant to discuss their personal views, even the best-informed specialists say they are at a loss to predict who will win.

LEAD: There is a story Don King tells on himself:

LEAD: Supporters of the Democrats' leading campaign finance proposal say Senator Alan Cranston, the California Democrat whose fund-raising techniques are under the scrutiny of Federal law-enforcement authorities, is quietly maneuvering to dilute the measure.

LEAD: The Essex House, at 160 Central Park South between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, is undergoing a renovation that includes redecorating it to bring it more in line with the Art Deco design it had when it opened in 1931. The $55 million project, scheduled to continue until early next year, will reduce the number of guest rooms from 690 to 580, making some larger and converting others into two-room suites.

LEAD: RIGHT after Chancellor Helmut Kohl returned from Moscow last week, posters appeared on the streets of Bonn showing his picture with Mikhail S. Gorbachev over the legend, ''The way is clear! Now comes unity!''

LEAD: THE AVENTINE, a 12-acre hotel and office complex designed by Michael Graves, the Princeton, N.J., architect who also designed the controversial and still unbuilt expansion of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, has set off a hot debate here. Some critics say the Post-Modern complex is out of keeping with the city's character and one described it as an ''architectural historian's nightmare.

LEAD: Supporters of the Whitney Museum of American Art can only hope that when the institution's trustees meet early next month to discuss, among other things, the future of Thomas N. Armstrong 3d, the museum's embattled director, they will devote considerable time to a related but larger issue. Missing amid the charges of frivolity and aimlessness against Mr.