LEAD: ''Hey, Keith!'' Jerome Brown yelled across the Philadelphia Eagles' locker room to Keith Jackson. Jackson was being swamped last Thursday by reporters and cameramen on his first day back from a 50-day, two-game contract holdout.

Pro Football;   Eagles Take Ryan Under Wing

LEAD: Gritty but richly historic, the Greenwich Village waterfront will be the subject of a month-long exhibition that opens Wednesday at the Urban Center gallery in the former Villard Houses, 457 Madison Avenue, at 51st Street. The centerpiece of the show will be a 20-foot-long scale model of the waterfront, with photographs, portraits, paintings, maps and text on the walls.

Postings: 'Village' Waterfront;   Show and Tell

LEAD: Two teams with opposite aims spent what seemed like a week at Yankee Stadium yesterday.

Baseball;   Yankees Defeat Red Sox

  Special Today:

LEAD: As Carnegie Hall prepares to open its centennial season Wednesday night, there may be no better moment to toast not only the health of the dowager queen of American concert halls but the durable values she typifies. Carnegie was designed according to an ancient and honorable esthetic that increasingly shows signs of returning to fashion: it is primarily a place to listen to specific kinds of music (classical is the inexact but useful word) in a civilized atmosphere.

  At 100, Carnegie Is Still the Place to Get To

LEAD: A Westport, Conn., real estate broker is putting on a mass showing of houses today and throwing in a clown, a cookout and a raffle to draw potential customers.

Postings: You Gotta Have a Gimmick;   Sale Cookout

LEAD: The Manhattan skyline will gain an unusual skyscraper crown under a plan announced last week to renovate a 35-story office tower at 475 Park Avenue South, at 32d Street.

Postings: On Park Ave. South;   Crowning Touch

LEAD: In planning the Carnegie Hall centennial, those organizing the season-long celebration found themselves practicing a peculiar brand of musical politics, emphasizing international and historical sweep yet keeping the event very American and very up-to-date. Page 25.

Orchestrating The Birthday Bash

LEAD: THE BOOK OF J    Translated by David Rosenberg.    Interpreted by Harold Bloom.    340 pp. New York:    Grove Weidenfeld. $21.95.

GOD SPEAKS THROUGH HIS WOMEN

LEAD: It would be hard to find another international military operation in which the raising and distribution of money has played so central a role as it has in the Persian Gulf crisis. Watching American officials traveling the globe in recent weeks collecting pledges of more than $20 billion to support the anti-Iraq coalition makes one wonder whether the United States has military allies in this affair or only limited financial partners.

  Running the Gulf Coalition Is Tricky Business

LEAD: After rising sharply for more than a decade, medical malpractice insurance premiums are now declining in many states around the country.

INSURERS REDUCING MALPRACTICE FEES FOR DOCTORS IN U.S.

LEAD: It was a four-letter word used so often today in the Notre Dame locker room you would have thought it obscene.

College Football;   Notre Dame Needs Another Rally

LEAD: NOT so long ago, Steve Adubato Jr., then producer and host of a local cable television public affairs program, was delighted to have snared an interview with the consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

Public Issue Forum Grows Up on TV

LEAD: It is once again a pleasant 30-minute drive from Bad Harzburg to Wernigerode through a classic German landscape of wooded mountains and half-timbered villages. The two towns share a common heritage: people used to speak the same dialect and were reared on the same legends of the Brocken, the nearby mountain where witches dance on Walpurgis Night.

A German Divide Fades, But 2 Towns Still Feel It

LEAD:    Poland Bracing for Election        Poland, tired but exhilarated after 14 months of a Solidarity-led Cabinet and Parliament, is bracing for a presidential election campaign that threatens to divide the nation and jeopardize economic and political change. Page 3.       Grocery Boycott Continues   

INSIDE

LEAD: In the two weeks before Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, the Bush Administration on the advice of Arab leaders gave President Saddam Hussein little reason to fear a forceful American response if his troops invaded the country.

  U.S. Gave Iraq Little Reason Not to Mount Kuwait Assault

LEAD: ''Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.''

  Memo to Banks: Deep-Six The Dividends

LEAD: A year after Hurricane Hugo devastated the Virgin Islands, residents are struggling to rebuild not just buildings, but also the vacation site's reputation, which was damaged by lawlessness and looting that followed the storm.

After Hurricane Hugo, A Double Repair Task

LEAD: With parachutists, panda balloons, 11,000 pigeons and 20,000 young Chinese dancers and martial arts experts, China opened the 11th Asian Games today as a mini-Olympics intended to win back international respect and domestic support lost during the military crackdown last year.

Games Offering China a Chance To Polish Image

BONN - IT has become common to speak of German unity in somber and elevated tones, as befits an event of such indisputable historic dimensions. But it is also instructive to note that the actual moment of unity, Oct. 3, was selected not for any historic or symbolic significance, but as a result of the most rollicking variety of political maneuvering.   Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to realize that unity was likely to create considerable dislocation and sacrifice on both sides, so he began pressing for reunification and elections as quickly as possible, before the full cost of the process began to undermine his aura as the Unity Chancellor. The opposition Social Democrats, for similar reasons, began demanding an even earlier date for unity - so that Mr. Kohl could be held directly responsible for any nastiness - and a later date for elections.   The struggle went through much of the summer, with both sides drawing heavily on military imagery to describe their successes and losses. When the Social Democrats succeeded in keeping the election in December, they spoke of "occupying an important strategic height" and of demonstrating "that we can stop the elephant Kohl." The Christian Democrats fought back with speeches accusing the Social Democratic front-runner of "hoping that the people in East Germany will be worse off so that his election chances would rise."   The maneuvering lasted through most of July and August, until finally the politicians agreed to merge the Germanys on Oct. 3, the earliest date possible for external reasons, and to hold state elections in East Germany on Oct. 14, followed by the first all-German balloting on Dec. 2.   What this means is that Oct. 3 will effectively mark the start of the final round in what must rank as one of the most hectic years in modern German politics.   Posters have already appeared around Bonn showing Mr. Kohl with the slogan, "Chancellor for Unity." At the same time, carpetbagging West German politicians have fanned through East Germany to run for the new vacancies there.   In the most celebrated such race, Kurt Biedenkopf, a former secretary general of the West German Christian Democrats who fell afoul of Mr. Kohl, is running for governor of Saxony against Anke Fuchs, the party manager of the West German Social Democrats.   It will be for history to judge whether the handling of unity has been wise or foolish. Ultimately, there may have been no real alternative to the headlong rush of the the last year; once the Berlin Wall was breached on Nov. 9 - and no German politician can claim credit for that - it became largely a question of managing what was effectively an accomplished fact.   Still, the cracking of the wall also sounded the starting gong for a political free-for-all in which nothing - not the date of unity, not economic union - has been left "above politics." Mr. Kohl, the consummate clubhouse pol, has so far proved himself the more adept player, pushing unity through a maze of political, economic and social obstacles with extraordinary energy and resourcefulness. By all current barometers, he appears certain to win the balloting in December to become the first elected chancellor of the reunited Germany.   Many have criticized the politicking as unseemly. Commentators in West Germany and abroad have lamented what one termed the hijacking of a solemn historic moment by a rowdy election campaign.   Yet there are those who argue that the politicians have not done so badly. Despite the extraordinary pace of unification and the disintegration of the East German economy, politicians and officials in both West and East have managed the administrative takeover so far without serious glitches.   "For anyone who has witnessed over the past 15 years the months of struggles over minor problems, this has been proof of a totally unexpected soundness," wrote Hans-Peter Schwarz, director of the political science department at the University of Bonn. "One of the many surprising discoveries of the past nine months is that West Germany, in the federal government and the states, has very competent politicians and officials."   One charge, heard most often from the rump of the East German Communist party, restyled the Party of Democratic Socialism, and from the popular movements that led the mass demonstrations in East Germany last fall, is that the West German politicians have essentially run over East Germany, shoving aside everything indigenous, including fledgling popular movements like New Forum.   Nobody denies the degree to which the West German parties have taken over in East Germany. But that is hardly surprising, according to Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard University.   "The West is essentially taking over a moribund company, and insists on running it," he said. "So it's natural that some East Germans feel they escaped from an indigenous totalitarian regime only to slip into the clutches of an imported regime that's running them 'for their own good'."   The Western dominance, however, cannot last for long, and the East German electorate is certain to eventually define its own interests. The question then will be what shape it gives to the politics of a unified Germany.   One line of speculation is that the addition of 16 million Protestants and a region with strong socialist traditions could shift the balance away from the Christian Democrats and their conservative Bavarian allies the Christian Socialists, and give new strength to the Social Democrats.   But initial voting patterns in East Germany have suggested that 40 years of Communism have fostered an allergy to socialism in any form and that religious differences are no longer as strong as they once were. So far, in any case, the Christian Democrats have shown the greater strength in the East.   A stronger possibility is that Germany will become divided along rich-poor lines, with a struggling East pitted against a protective West. One initial indication of this was the decision by West Germany to give its large states greater weight in the upper house of Parliament, enough to deny the five new East German states a collective veto.   Even longer-term prognoses divide Germany into a rich south - with a revived industrial belt in Saxony in East Germany shaping a "green belt" with the rich West German southern states of Badem-Wurttemberg and Bavaria - and a poor north. Agriculture and industry are suffering in both East and West Germany.  One effect that is already apparent has been the battering of fringe parties on both right and left. In West Germany, the right-wing Republican Party has disintegrated in internal squabbling and the far right has found no new cause around which to rally.   On the left, the Party of Democratic Socialism - the restyled East German Communists - have rallied under their chairman, Gregor Gysi, to form a nationwide alliance of the left. Current opinion polls, however, do not give them the five percent needed to enter Parliament, and their net effect may be to siphon critical votes from the Greens.   If these trends persist, the first Parliament elected by a unified Germany is likely to consist largely of major parties with Mr. Kohl's coalition again in the saddle. Current polls show Mr. Kohl's Christian Democrats with 45 percent, followed by the Social Democrats, with 36 percent. That would leave Mr. Kohl once again dependent on Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's Free Democrats, with about 10 percent of the vote, to form a coalition government.   That Mr. Kohl will become the first all-German chancellor is not in question, since on Oct. 3, East Germany will technically accede to the existing Federal Republic.   At the same time, the East German Parliament and Government will simply cease to exist. Mr. Kohl has let it be known that four East German ministers will join the all-German cabinet after Oct. 3 as ministers without portfolio, and 144 of the 400 members of the East German parliament will take seats alongside 530 West German deputies in the Bundestag in Bonn.

  Unity Approaches, and East Germany Is Looming Smaller

LEAD: GWEN E. GUSTAFSON'S research subjects are often unpredictable, sometimes confounding. Slated to meet at a laboratory for some clinical observations, they kick their feet, cry uncontrollably, even fall asleep on the floor. After all, they're only babies.  Dr. Gustafson, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, has been studying infant development for 15 years, so she is used to fussing and feistiness.

At UConn Baby Lab, Researchers Seek Messages Amid the Tears

LEAD: The Mets rose up from the ruins of their divisional race today, manhandled the Chicago Cubs, 11-5, and even gained a game on the first-place Pittsburgh Pirates. But they had no illusions about the mean mathematics. After losing five straight games before this one, they stood two and a half games out with only 11 left to play.

Baseball;   Mets End Slide at 5; Trail by Only 2 1/2

LEAD: Hale House, a narrow brownstone on 122d Street in Harlem that has been home to 800 unwanted babies since 1969, is the city's shrine to good works. Clara Hale, who began rescuing children off the streets in 1941, has long been a secular saint.

Hale House Fights City Hall on Babies' Care

LEAD: David and Toni small have just spent $50,000 to improve their home in Lake Hopatcong, N.J. The updated kitchen has new oak cabinets, a new floor of Mexican tiles, new pale yellow countertops and new appliances. The terrace and stone steps leading from the house to the shore of the lake have been regrouted and the 10-room house is wearing a fresh coat of paint.

Residential Remodeling Making Gains

LEAD: SOME days Enrique, a 38-year-old man with AIDS, is too weak to fix himself something to eat. His housemates, Elmer, 56, and Lillie, 19, who also have AIDS, bring him a bowl of cereal or a sandwich.

September 23, 1990

Headlines from September 23, 1990

Pro Football; Eagles Take Ryan Under Wing

Postings: 'Village' Waterfront; Show and Tell

Baseball; Yankees Defeat Red Sox

Special Today:

At 100, Carnegie Is Still the Place to Get To

Billboard 200

Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em

Wilson Phillips

Blaze Of Glory/Young Guns II

Mariah Carey

Poison

Historical Context for September 23, 1990