November 29, 1992

TWO MEN, R. J. Allison and Mark Kaplowe, sink their jeans-clad, six-foot-plus frames into a couple of seats on Metro-North Commuter Railroad at New Haven looking as if they were planning on kicking around some West Village record stores for the afternoon.

"Harlem" and "Beach" are words that do not customarily go together. And no one will be encouraged to swim off Harlem's shore. But the first $1 million is in hand for the Harlem Beach Esplanade, a 20-acre park that is eventually to run from 125th to 145th Street, along the Harlem River. Borough President Ruth W. Messinger of Manhattan said that while pollution rendered swimming unsafe, the esplanade would have features "to evoke the sense of a beach and to encourage beach-style activities": barbecuing, picnicking, fishing, sunbathing, wading, jogging, biking and strolling.

Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who is a leading member of the Senate Banking Committee, helped guide a troubled Dallas savings and loan operator in dealings with Federal regulators one year after the executive had picked up nearly half of about $117,000 worth of building expenses on the Senator's waterfront vacation home in Maryland. Back in 1987, Jerry D. Stiles, then a prominent homebuilder and developer in the Dallas area, took on a project for Mr. Gramm and his wife, who together had bought more than 35 acres on a remote part of Maryland's Eastern Shore and needed a contractor to finish construction on the shell of a two-story house. Mr. Stiles also owned three Texas savings and loans, which later failed and which regulators say will cost taxpayers more than $200 million.

A year ago, after Communism's collapse, the United Nations seemed to be carving out a major new role for itself. It began ambitious peace initiatives in trouble spots around the world from Central America to the Balkans through Africa and the Middle East to Cambodia. But today, despite undoubted success in defusing conflicts in Nicaragua and Namibia, many of the initiatives seem to be faltering. In some cases, a lack of resources or poor diplomacy appears to be the reason, but often the explanation lies in an underestimation of the animosity that lies behind these conflicts.

A TURF war has developed among three major hospitals that could radically change hospital service in Suffolk County. The battle lines were drawn this month when North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset announced plans to acquire a financially floundering proprietary institution, Community Hospital of Western Suffolk in Smithtown. A spokeswoman for North Shore, a tertiary-care hospital with an operating budget of $465 million a year, said the move was the latest step in a drive to build a hospital network on the Island.