January 21, 1993

NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT FARE CARDS FACING DELAYS The automated fare system due to open early next year in the city's buses and subway stations has encountered delays and cost overruns because of design flaws and equipment delivery problems, transit officials said. For buses, the system will be delayed by at least until December 1994, the officials said. In the subways, it is still to begin in some stations in December and in all major stations by March 1994. But a Transit Authority report warned that further delays could postpone those dates as well. B3. REPUTED CRIME BOSS'S REPUTED CACHE

Had David Hockney painted a century earlier, he might have moved from dreary northern England to sun-blasted Provence, but instead it was to Los Angeles that he famously migrated in 1964. "I was brought up in Gothic gloom," he said of his youth in the industrial city of Bradford. "All the buildings are absolutely black, and it rains practically every other day. I'm a bit like van Gogh. He's a northerner who went to the sun. He thought there was more joy in the sun, and I tend to think that as well."

When Elise Goldstein and Baruch Browns of Toronto were married six years ago, they discussed what name they would pass on to their offspring. "We absolutely wanted a family name," said Ms. Goldstein, a rabbi. But, she added, they wanted a creative alternative to passing on only the father's surname. The solution? They took the gold from Goldstein, the brown from Browns, mixed them together and created Sienna, the legal last name of their children, Noam, 3, and Carmi, 20 months. As Mr. Browns, a calligrapher and school administrator, put it, "Ocher, or those other muddy yellow colors, didn't seem like nice names."

Today was the day of Bill Clinton's dreams, the day he and his party finished the arduous climb to a "joyful mountaintop of celebration," but like all Inauguration Days, it was more than that. It was a day when the nation committed itself once more, with the recital of a simple 18th-century oath, to what the new President felicitously termed "the mystery of American renewal." The solemn magic of the moment, in this most telling of national rituals, lies in what it symbolizes: the unquestioned acceptance by victor, vanquished and public alike of the continuity and legitimacy of governance.

The AMR Corporation, parent of American Airlines, yesterday reported a fourth-quarter loss of $200 million and warned that it might have to shut some of its unprofitable hubs and cut its fleet to curb losses. The quarterly deficit, larger than some analysts had expected, widened from $125 million in the period a year earlier, when Persian Gulf hostilities had sent jet-fuel prices soaring and passenger traffic plunging.