April 18, 1993

When night draws across the broken-faced tenements of the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, Freddie Cherokee Brown's teen-age eyes narrow and his boyish face hardens. On the dark and dangerous streets where Freddie regularly moves like a shadow, harm's hand beckons from nearly every turn. Crack fumes curl out of a grimy doorway. Prostitutes troll lonely street corners for easy customers and hard cash.

A TERRORIST attack of the magnitude of the World Trade Center disaster happening in Westchester County is not wild-eyed conjecture, one expert on bombs and combating terrorism said recently in an opinion that is not universally shared. Westchester, with its corporate headquarters and nuclear power plants, malls and religious institutions, is an important potential target for terrorists and even more vulnerable than New York City, said Paul Ragonese, whose exploits include the disarming of the largest bomb ever found in New York City. Westchester companies are more vulnerable to terrorism than New York City companies, he said, "because of the laid-back attitude" in the county, the feeling that it can't happen here.

Scores of New York City employers -- from New York Telephone and Arthur Andersen to Merrill Lynch and Grey Advertising -- are making quantum leaps in learning how to produce ever more work with ever fewer people, according to economic data and a large amount of anecdotal evidence. Ultimately, this remarkable innovation could help rejuvenate New York's ailing economy, by increasing its competitiveness in the intensifying battle for global markets.

WHEN it comes to inflation and share prices, the most important question is not how big the inflation is, but where it is. When the market allows companies to raise prices almost at will, Wall Street comes to love them. What is going on now is a reshuffling of inflationary pressures. With the dollar down -- and the Clinton Administration evidently quite happy to keep it there -- the pressures are receding on those American companies that sell goods subject to international competition. Mr. Clinton's tendency toward managed trade and quotas -- illustrated last week in his talks with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa -- also bodes well for those companies.

IN a landscape of stunted trees and dead vegetation, a metal fence marks the boundary between the 1,200-acre Runyon Watershed -- source of the water supply for the 50,000 residents of Perth Amboy and South Amboy -- and the 35-acre tract of chemical companies that makes up the CPS/ Madison Superfund site here. CPS, formerly known as Chemical and Pollution Sciences, has a factory building and storage tanks on the site. Nearby is a collection of buildings and tanker trailers owned by a group of companies -- including Madison Industries Inc. and Old Bridge Chemicals Inc. -- that, according to court records, share the same address and ownership. A pile of sludge the size of a ranch house sits on the site.