November 21, 1993

Although it is 22 years old, Touro College is only now constructing its first building from the ground up: the five-story Flatbush Center on Avenue J, between East 16th and 17th Streets, in Brooklyn. Touro's other academic quarters have been in existing buildings. "It's a very community-related school because it deals with the local population, so it is important that the building be a good neighbor," said Peter Samton of Gruzen Samton, the Manhattan architectural firm that is designing the Flatbush Center. That consideration -- plus zoning -- dictated the gabled roof profile, which is meant to complement its residential surroundings, as is the use of red brick for the facade.

MAKING IT WORK 3 Staff Sgt. Allen X. Johnson's mission is to meet, greet and deliver the message. The message: Be all you can be. NEW YORKERS & CO. 4 Need a copy of "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself but Leave His Wife Alone"? The Music Exchange has all the scores. PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD 14 Hopi stories in Greenwich Village; Baldwin's "Amen Corner" in St. Albans. MOVIE CLOCK 15 What's showing at the local movie houses, today through Thursday. GOOD EATING 20 A cross-cultural stew in Chelsea: soba noodles or fusilli at Lola Bowla, Moo Shu Mex at the Bright Food Shop. SOAPBOX 23 How well would you drive a taxi in Delhi? In defense of the immigrant cabbie. Plus, letters and "Eye of the Beholder."

The Senate passed the Brady gun control bill and the North American Free Trade Agreement tonight and finished its major work for the year. That left the House still struggling to conclude the first session of the 103d Congress as it faced tough fights Sunday and Monday over campaign finance and lobbying legislation and a measure to impose $90 billion in further budget cuts.

ULTIMATELY, this is about the sanctity of the "WALK" signal. If you can't trust the city's permission to cross a street, what can you trust? "I don't trust it, not anymore," snaps Constance N. Bartlett. "I look both ways on one-way streets. I'm very fearful. And angry." Two years ago, Mrs. Bartlett, then 70, was run down by a bicycle messenger while she was crossing Broadway on a rainy spring evening. It was one of 359 bike-pedestrian accidents reported by the police in 1991. Her right hip was broken. She was hospitalized twice, immediately to put pins in her hip, later for a new plastic hip. She sued, and stewed.

At a hospital complex on Roosevelt Island that opened in the 1930's to treat people stricken in an earlier epidemic of tuberculosis, a tiny ward has opened half a century later where 15 patients are being held against their will in effort to control another outbreak of the disease. The patients, like Valerie Black, a 31-year-old former heroin user, and Rafael Serrano, a 33-year-old registered nurse, are being confined in New York's first modern-day tuberculosis sanitarium not because they are contagious and might transmit the disease, but rather because health officials say they have repeatedly failed to take their medicines. Strict New Regulations Their confinement in a ward of the Goldwater Memorial Hospital is the result of strict new regulations that allow city health officials to detain tuberculosis patients for the months and even years it takes to complete a cure.