August 18, 1991

Owners of the new Ramada Suite Hotel in Weehawken, N.J., fail to see why the Hudson River should prevent them from filling their rooms with Manhattan-bound travelers. The hotel, which opened Aug. 4, is providing free ferry rides between the Lincoln Harbor complex, where it is situated, and Manhattan.

The nation is rapidly running out of telephone numbers. As facsimile machines, cellular phones, pocket pagers, computer modems and business telephones proliferate, the supply of unassigned numbers is being exhausted in the area codes serving the largest American cities, like 212 for Manhattan and the Bronx and 213 for Los Angeles.

After nearly three decades of rigorous activity in commercial development across the country, the Wolstein Group is responding to the industry slowdown by returning to its home base in Cleveland and putting its future in residential projects. With more than 125 shopping centers in 36 states as well as several industrial and hotel properties under their belts, principals of the private development firm believe that it is in home building that the flagging real estate industry will rebound in the 1990's.

ANNE SEXTON A Biography. By Diane Wood Middlebrook. Illustrated. 488 pp. Boston: A Peter Davison Book/ Houghton Mifflin Company.

The Arab Contractor's Video Club, on the banks of the Nile, offers the kinds of hot movie deals you can't get in the States: for 50 cents a night, they'll rent video copies of "Silence of the Lambs," a film that hasn't even been released for home viewing by its producers. Across town, at the Radwan al-Ogeil department store, the bargains are in computer software. Games that sell for $50 in the U.S. go for about $9, copied from the original onto blank diskettes, and then neatly repackaged in plastic, complete with a photocopy of the instruction manual.