September 5, 1993

THE New York Jets preseason practice field at Hofstra University was rung by Long Islanders watching the men running, throwing, catching and kicking on the greensward. Sitting unobtrusively in a lawn chair under a tree most days was a large-boned man wearing a St. John's University baseball cap. He acknowledged occasional greetings from some of the other spectators. An assistant coach leaving the field would ask him how he was. On another occasion, a Jet, the blond wearing No. 7, went over to say he would have a package for him.

It was the first house on its block. When the six-story Beaux-Arts town house at 18 West 86th Street was completed in 1906, it was a lovingly designed private residence. But over eight decades, the house, which is in the Upper West Side Historic District, slowly deteriorated. It changed hands several times. It became a multiple dwelling. Many of its rooms were cut up into small apartments, and much of its intricate period detail fell into disrepair. That's the way it was when it was found by Susan Weber Soros, who decided it would make a perfect home for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. "The building was in a remarkable state of decay, but I could still feel its Old World elegance," said Ms. Soros, director and founder of the center, Bard College's newest graduate school. "It's one of the few town houses I looked at that was light in most of the rooms. And the 86th Street location means it's accessible by subway and crosstown bus and is very close to the city's libraries and museums."

SAND bars at its northern and southern tips give Robins Island the look of a hurricane on a meteorological chart, as if the 445-acre island, one of the largest undeveloped islands in the Northeast, were spinning and gathering force over Peconic Bay. To the west in Hauppauge the Suffolk County Legislature is to vote in the fall on a settlement advanced by County Executive Robert J. Gaffney that would reverse the county's four-year effort to buy the island for $9.2 million for preservation as a nature sanctuary and historical site.

As returning vacationers empty their mailboxes of fall department store catalogues and glossy magazines, they may well wonder whether the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from above. The fashionable woman is pictured cloaked in a shroud, shod in high-laced boots worthy of Chaucer's pilgrims and draped in a clutch of crosses. It isn't just Christianity's symbol that is being fervently appropriated. Runways, fashion advertisements and magazine layouts are rife with what could be the wardrobe at a religious summit meeting: Hare Krishna silks, hooded and rope-belted monks' robes, clerical tunics, the plain garb of the Amish and even the black gabardines of the Hasidic Jews. Nothing, it seems, is sacred.

WHAT do you do? Drive a bulldozer. Bend the steel and weld the seams to make the bulldozer. Supervise and feed and mend the driver and the welder. Bring home the bacon. Keep up with the Joneses. Buy Chevrolets and Frigidaires and make the economy turn.