May 3, 1993

After decades of counting on big business and local government to create jobs, New York City must now look mainly to small companies to rebuild its decimated jobs base and thus must make it easier for them to operate, political leaders, economists and urban planners say. This represents a new attitude toward small businesses, which for years have lacked the clout to pressure City Hall for the tax concessions and financial incentives granted to large corporations, like CBS, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Stanley and Prudential Securities, that threatened to leave the city.

In a classroom in the heart of Provence, a teacher and her 8-year-old pupils are working against 400 years of history: instead of learning to read and write in French, the children are being taught in their native Provencal, a language first carried across the Continent by the troubadours of the Middle Ages. For "yes," the class writes "oc." Not "oui."

The budget Mayor David N. Dinkins will unveil this morning calls for nearly $100 million in new cuts, city officials said last night, but it relies heavily on $530 million in state and Federal aid that may not materialize. All spring, Mr. Dinkins has been laboring to close a $2.1 billion gap in the city's $31.4 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Every Friday afternoon, hundreds of black men, women and children stop work or school for a couple of hours and hurry to a 15,000-square-foot building on the edge of town. They represent the rainbow of black America: suburban and urban; professional and poor; deep brown and light tan. They pull up in faded station wagons and gleaming Mercedes Benzes. Inside, the men sit in the front; the women in the back. Many used to be Baptists, African Methodist or Roman Catholic.

On the way up to the summit of the red rock mesas where uranium was mined for atomic bombs for a quarter-century, Jim John pointed to the frail houses and quietly recited the names of Navajo miners who died young of lung cancer. "John Yellowhorse. Tony Sorrowhorse. Clark Dick. John Tapaha. Peter Yazzie. Harry James. James Yazzie. Billy Johnson. Jimmy Johnson," he said. He did not mention his own father, Lee John, a respected Navajo tribesman who died in 1971 at age 34, leaving behind a widow and nine children.