April 24, 1994

With the Federal Reserve pushing up interest rates, a disagreement has surfaced about whether the central bank might be trying unnecessarily to keep at least a million unemployed people out of jobs in the belief that this is required to hold down inflation. Neither the Federal Reserve nor the Clinton Administration, which has endorsed the Fed's anti-inflation policies so far, would say they were in favor of bolstering unemployment. That would be damaging politically, and contrary to the job-creation goals of the Administration.

WATCH OUT, Penney. Beware, Target. Take care, local retailer. At an obscure shopping strip in this San Francisco suburb known mostly for its many cemeteries, Gap Inc. has just opened a new kind of store that might well change the business of selling clothing to the vast majority of Americans. The concept behind the store, part of a new chain called the Old Navy Clothing Company that is soon to be in 45 places nationwide, is simple. Shoppers who can't afford the Gap or other such retailers deserve better than the bland, poorly made and often carelessly displayed offerings of many stores with low prices. Combine the style and quality on which the Gap stores made their name with the low prices and big selection of a Toys "R" Us or a Home Depot, and you will steal this market -- $75 billion, by some estimates -- and become very rich indeed. Sell to the masses, live with the classes.

They come wheeling off the Henry Hudson Parkway and the Major Deegan Expressway, drug dealers, big and small, from New Jersey and upstate New York, from Connecticut and Pennsylvania and sometimes farther south, cruising in to buy cocaine in what has become one of the biggest wholesale drug markets in the country. Their destination, as well of that of many dealers from elsewhere in New York City, is a little patch of Harlem that became notorious this month as the home of the largest collection of police officers charged with corruption in nearly a decade.

AS road crews work overtime to repair pockmarked roadways, school administrators struggle to fill the gaping holes in the school calendar left by the harsh winter. In Washington Borough, for example, the week beginning April 4 was supposed to have been spring break. Instead, because the district lost 15 days to winter storms, students endured a week of school, including four hours of classes on Saturday.

TO Joseph Zampano (known also as Joe Zip or Zippy), the Tomlinson Bridge is "old reliable" and the operators' house on the bridge -- with mesh over the windows to deflect thrown bottles but also a spectacular view of tugboats and shimmering Long Island Sound and sunsets slipping behind pink oil tanks -- is home. To historians, the bridge is the most recent in a succession of moveable bridges that have spanned the head of New Haven Harbor since the 18th century. It was in 1793 that a charter was granted to one Isaac Tomlinson "and other businessmen" to span the Quinnipiac River in New Haven from East Water Street to south of Stable Point.