June 28, 1991

The directors of the C&S/Sovran Financial Corporation are discovering that two years and one false step make all the difference in the turbulent banking industry. In 1989, Bennett A. Brown, then the chairman of the Citizens and Southern Corporation, would not even meet with Hugh L. McColl Jr., the aggressive chairman of the NCNB Corporation, who had started a hostile takeover bid for Citizens and Southern. Instead, Mr. Brown, a courtly Georgia banker, not too politely told Mr. McColl to mind his own bank.

ON July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was approved by a vote of the Continental Congress, with New York abstaining. Maybe too many New Yorkers felt an unseemly chumminess with their colonial masters, though a nicer thought is that they were too cosmopolitan even for the first Fourth. But Gotham -- as distinct from all those All-American burgs upstate -- hasn't exactly risen to the big moment since. Too busy making money or something. The shining exception was a Manhattan deli's 60-pound Statue of Liberty made entirely of chopped liver in honor of the statue's 100th birthday five years ago.

The cars, their smoked-glass windows shut tight to the afternoon sun, line up two or three in a row along the busy streets of Elmhurst, Queens. The customers, a pastiche of this most variously immigrant of New York neighborhoods, stand at the curb in long lines, waiting to climb into the cars. The wait is long; the lines move in precisely timed 20-minute intervals. The customers are phoning home -- some for love, and some about drugs.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, a living hero of the civil rights movement and one of the last liberal voices on the Supreme Court, announced his retirement today after 24 years that ended in mounting anger and discouragement as he watched the ascendancy of a conservative-dominated bench. The 82-year-old Justice, the only black to have served on the Supreme Court, said his resignation would take effect when a successor was confirmed by the Senate. It gives President Bush his second appointment to the Court and will leave it with only one member, Justice Byron R. White, who was named by a Democratic President. Pressure for a Black Nominee The selection of Justice Marshall's successor will not affect the Court's philosophy as fundamentally as did the appointment of Justice David H. Souter last year, which further tipped the balance away from the old liberal majority and filled the vacancy created by the retirement of the intellectual leader of that coalition, Justice William J. Brennan Jr.

In the greatest challenge of his career, Mayor David N. Dinkins is waiting for a miracle. Four days before the start of New York City's new fiscal year, his goal in handling its overwhelming fiscal problems has boiled down to a single word: survival. So grim are the Mayor's prospects that he would count as a victory the adoption of a budget whose painful service cuts he called unbearable just a month ago. Instead, he is struggling desperately to stave off deeper cuts proposed by the City Council to hold down property taxes. And in the best case he would lose something.