May 3, 1991

Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez will propose an overhaul of New York City's expensive and much criticized system of special education to reduce the number of children wrongly assigned to classes for the handicapped and to channel more money to children in regular classes. The aim is to stem a problem that has been growing for 15 years: the placement of tens of thousands of children with no discernible handicaps in classes for the learning disabled and emotionally disturbed because their teachers feel that such placements are the only way to give them the smaller classes and counseling they need.

A plainclothes officer investigating a 911 call about a teen-age gunman was shot and seriously wounded in Queens yesterday afternoon when he ordered three young people to line up against a wall and one whirled around, firing three shots from a .38-caliber revolver, the police said. The injured officer's partner returned the fire, killing the gunman as his two companions fled, the police said. The companions, described as a teen-age boy and girl, remained at large last night.

AMBITION abounds at the Peninsula Hotel, and I do not mean the crass extravagance that usually passes for it in the form of revolving restaurants, vertiginous atriums of the Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon variety. This hotel, open barely one year, aspires to something more genuine and risky, the emulation of two esteemed ancestors. One is the Gotham Hotel, whose Beaux-Arts building at Fifth Avenue and West 55th Street the Peninsula inhabits; the other is the Peninsula's Hong Kong namesake. Now, I cannot claim any affinity for the Gotham, although habitues tell me that through the 1960's its lobby cocktail lounge defined the conviviality of the three-martini era. As for the original Peninsula, I am unabashed in my adulation.

THE crossroads of the world has moved eastward about a half-dozen miles from its traditional intersection at Times Square, to central Queens. Like continental plates overlapping on the unsettled global surface, the most unlikely mix of newcomers, from Colombians to Koreans, from Indians to Uruguayans, has established communities virtually beneath the flight paths of the airplanes that brought these settlers to their new world. Here, along the axis of Roosevelt Avenue, which forms the border of Jackson Heights (on the north side) and Elmhurst (on the south), there is a stir of business and pleasure in a babble of tongues. Rest stops for the serendipitous between 71st Street and Junction Boulevard, under the unprepossessing shadow of the overhead No. 7 line on Roosevelt Avenue and on the more attractive surrounding streets, are in the shape of a generous assortment of restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries, stocked with food that ranges from the parilladas of the Rio de la Plata to the masala dosai that recalls life on the Ganges.

A Goldman, Sachs fund that had become the largest fund speculating in the bonds of financially troubled companies said yesterday that it would begin phasing out operations immediately despite what it said were excellent financial results. The Water Street Corporate Recovery Fund raised $783.5 million last year, largely from institutional investors, and has since played an important role in at least two corporate restructurings. When it raised the money, Goldman, Sachs & Company said it expected the fund to stay in operation for at least four years and possibly as many as seven.