August 4, 1991

WHEN I was small, Joe Louis was the Champ and Franklin D. Roosevelt was the President. By the time I could read, they had both been hot-typed into media legend: The Brown Bomber was the role model for his race, humble, powerful and nonthreatening to whites, while F.D.R. was the bold aristocrat who used his power for the little people. They both adored their wives. We know better now. Louis was psychologically disturbed, eventually institutionalized, perhaps because of the pressure of a double life. He was an abuser of alcohol, drugs and women of all colors. Roosevelt abused his power and cheated on his wife. The false images were created for the supposed good of the country. We needed historians to finally tell us the truth because journalists, mostly male and white, didn't want to jeopardize their access to the big league locker rooms.

In the 1880's, William Astor owned much of the land between Fifth Avenue and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, and when 28 brick rowhouses with wooden porches and small front yards was built along the south side 130th Street, the street became known as Astor Row. The houses were designated landmarks in 1981, and now an ambitious program of loans and grants, including a grant of half a million dollars from the Vincent Astor Foundation, has been created to help restore those brick facades and bucolic porches.

FOR Matthew Auerbach, a comedy writer, freelance rock critic and Manhattan renter, the real estate slump could be worse. Later this month, he will bid adieu to a quintessentially New York home, a fifth floor walk-up railroad flat on York Avenue in the 80's that he calls "the North Pole." He is moving downtown and up scale, joining thousands of New Yorkers who have seized upon the depressed market to seek the best deals they can find in rental housing.

PROMISED temporary immunity from pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs, the rank and file members of Suffolk County's police force were smarting last week over a $3.6 million concession that the county wrested from their union leaders. But as the recession and the financial turmoil it has brought to the county reached into the realm of those sworn to enforce the law, the emerging question seemed to be whether Suffolk will have money to hire new officers as veterans retire.

THE JAMESES A Family Narrative. By R. W. B. Lewis. Illustrated. 696 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.