July 5, 1992

THE center held. That was the story of this surprising and fascinating Supreme Court term, a term that appeared only months ago to have all the makings of a conservative counterrevolution but that in the end produced powerful, if qualified, reaffirmations of some of the Court's most important modern precedents.

AFTER a month of high panic and strange omens as the two major parties struggled to adjust to Ross Perot and a three-way race for the Presidency, a few rough lessons are clear. First and foremost, Mr. Perot's rivals learned that the Dallas billionaire would bleed just like any other pol. In May and early June, his surge in the polls had crossed most of the lines of ideology, demographics, party and region, a strange new phenomenon from talk-show land that seemed immune to the normal rules of politics. After a month in the arena, however, getting frisked by the news media and worked over by Republican surrogates for President Bush, Mr. Perot looked much more vulnerable to both parties.

Last Wednesday, the first building opened in a 135-unit apartment complex here that will test market acceptance of a kind of housing rarely built in northern California outside large cities. The four-story, four building rental complex, Del Norte Place, in this San Francisco suburb has 35 units an acre, making it both denser and higher than standard suburban multifamily developments. Most residential projects in the region have a maximum density of 16 units an acre.

Faced with the worst drought in southern Africa this century, the wildlife authorities at a national park here are proceeding with what they call the grim but essential step of killing thousands of elephants and impalas so other animals as well as starving people can survive. While animal kills are common here and elsewhere as a form of habitat management -- wildlife officials prefer the term "culling" -- rarely if ever has a drought forced the authorities to act on such a scale and with such human urgency as in the program under way at the Gonarezhou National Park.

For four years, the Unisys Corporation, a computer manufacturer, operated a research-and-development division out of a 78,000-square-foot building on 90 acres in Flanders, N.J. Last year, however, it left the site, and Benjamin Moore & Co., a leading paint manufacturer, bought it for $3.5 million. Last month it began altering the building to make it into a state-of-the-art technical and administrative center. About 120 employees will use the new facility, which will house the company's central laboratories and data processing and engineering departments. It will also have a model store for sales training and a "paint farm" where paints are tested under actual weather conditions. The company, based in Newark, anticipates spending $42 million on the changes.

It was a challenge to the zoning laws of Mount Laurel, N.J., in the 1970's that led to a statewide requirement that all communities open their doors to low- and moderate-income residents. Among the projects helping Mount Laurel meet its own affordable-housing obligation is the Commons at Stonegate, a condominium complex being developed near the intersection of I-295 and Route 38. The developer, the Orleans Company of Huntington Valley, Pa., plans to build 440 homes there over the next three years, completing 48 by the end of the summer. The architect is the Murphy Architectural Group of Westchester, Pa.

BIG Sky. Open Space. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. These sentiments are selling better than ever, in Ralph Lauren-styled clothing and furniture, vacations built around cowboy themes, and range country sliced into 20-acre "ranchettes" tailored for the urban refugee. At high noon it's easier to get espresso in Bozeman, Montana, than it is to find an available spittoon. But many of those people sipping their iced caffe lattes have come to Bozeman, not far from where Ted Turner is raising buffalo on his vast ranch, precisely because tobacco-spitting is part of the mythic landscape.

More people were working in America in June than in any month since the end of 1990. If that's not what you thought you read in the papers last week, don't worry. It isn't. The report that employment plunged in June, with nonfarm payrolls declining by 117,000, helped to persuade the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates yet again and spurred more talk about a "triple-dip" recession.

After two years of being battered by recession, the Timken Company, a producer of bearings and high-quality steel in Canton, Ohio, is beginning to stir. In its cavernous plant in a quiet city an hour south of Cleveland, forklifts whiz back and forth, and men and women in bright yellow hard hats scurry to fill the growing level of new orders.

HAIR braided neatly, straight out of a Robert Herrick poem, a sprightly young ballgirl bent down for a loose tennis ball yesterday, only to encounter pure living terror, the Yank From Hell. Looming above her was the grim executioner himself, J. P. McEnroe Jr., wielding a tennis racquet at the offending ball but about to clobber her directly on the wrist.

Majestic in a gray morning mist, the world's largest gathering of tall ships in this century sailed out of the past and up the great amphitheater of New York Harbor yesterday in a stately salute to Independence Day and the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage of discovery to the New World. Canvas set, pennants fluttering, a breeze singing in the rigging, the 11-mile procession of 34 windjammers and other craft -- 270 ships from 37 nations -- moved across the whitecap-flecked harbor and up the Hudson in an awesome and graceful five-hour parade, reviewed by a flotilla of smaller boats, one million people on shore and a national television audience.

NASSAU COUNTY officials are pressing Federal and state authorities to approve a last-minute switch in the county's plans for disposing of its sewage sludge. Instead of treating it in Wantagh and East Rockaway, they want it treated next to a 3,000-acre state park in upstate Putnam Valley. "Let the bears hold their noses," said the County Attorney, Robert W. Schmidt.