October 10, 1991

ELEVEN years ago, an architect named E. Fay Jones designed a nondenominational chapel, set in the woods near Eureka Springs, Ark. It was to be a $150,000 abstract Gothic cathedral, a forest within a forest, with glass walls open to nature. So as not to disturb the birds and trees, Mr. Jones chose only materials that could be carried along a narrow hillside pathway to the construction site. Mr. Jones and his wife, Gus, even came up with the name for the spiky little shrine: Thorncrown Chapel.

The family of a prominent Harlem lawyer blamed Harlem Hospital yesterday for the man's death on Monday, charging that the hospital resisted pleas to admit the 74-year-old man and kept him in the emergency room for 18 hours. The lawyer, William C. Chance Jr., had been a member of the hospital's community board in the 1970's and 80's. He was an old friend of Mayor David N. Dinkins, and a former president of the Harlem Lawyers Association and legal counsel for the New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Among his clients were Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Hulan E. Jack, the late Manhattan Borough President.

When Maksouda Bhuiyan, an announcer on a Bangladeshi cable television program in New York City, answered a knock at her front door recently, a Bangladeshi man, his wife and their 5-month-old child were standing outside. The family, who had arrived in the United States only hours earlier on a flight from Bangladesh, carried a picture of Mrs. Bhuiyan that they had clipped from a magazine. The couple, who knew no one in the city when they arrived about three weeks ago, needed a place to stay. Mrs. Bhuiyan allowed the family to move in with her. She did not have the heart to refuse them. She continues to feed them, and they live with the Bangladeshi family next door.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared to reopen hearings on Judge Clarence Thomas, a determined President Bush rushed to support his Supreme Court nominee today. The White House plotted a counterattack to present Judge Thomas as a family man with greater credibility than the woman accusing him of sexual harassment. "I've got strong feelings, but they all end up in support for Clarence Thomas," said Mr. Bush, who drew Judge Thomas out of the seclusion in which he had been weathering the sudden storm over his nomination and brought him to the White House for a high-profile meeting.

Stung by the collapse of his ambitious plans for taking a chartered airplane to South Africa with a large delegation of city officials and business executives, Mayor David N. Dinkins now plans a scaled-down trip on commercial flights, with many members of his entourage paying their own way. The Mayor postponed the trip last month because, he said, a top aide was too busy working to calm the racial violence in Crown Heights to raise the necessary $500,000 in private funds for the flight for him and several dozen officials, aides and friends. The fund-raising effort had drawn questions from some civic groups.