May 22, 1994

LEE A. IACOCCA, who was about to leave the top job at the Chrysler Corporation, was shaking his head. This was a couple of years ago, in his sumptuous office in Chrysler's sumptuous New York headquarters, and he was talking about the electric van I had just driven, which didn't work very well. The problem, of course, was the battery technology, ancient and not ready for an unpolluted brave new world in which everyone will drink Perrier and will have stubbed out the final cigarette.

Throughout much of the 1980's, the five-story buildings that stand along the west side of Crotona Park in the South Bronx were festooned with six-pane windows, half-open shades and louvered shutters -- all fake. The large decorative decals were a well-intentioned but much-ridiculed attempt to give life to what was then a strip of abandoned city-owned apartment houses. These days, though, the apartments have real windows, shades and shutters. They were rehabilitated by Phipps Houses of Manhattan into Crotona Park West, a 20-building development providing 563 units for 2,200 low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. Monthly rents range from as low as $328 for a studio for a family earning $14,200 to $17,040 a year to $680 for a three-bedroom unit for a family earning $28,760 to $34,510 a year.

A WAY IN THE WORLD By V. S. Naipaul. 380 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

A BIG bear of a man sporting yellow hip waders, J. Kemler Appell, lumbered along wooden planks stretched across a small pond to catch Beautiful, a West African crown crane. The bird resisted, the rush of air sounding as its wings flashed wide. But Mr. Appell persisted, and with two quick giant steps on the bowing plank, he had Beautiful in a body hold. The class of second-graders from the Renbrook School in West Hartford stood mystified, each one getting a turn petting the crane's spikey crown and velvety head.

In April 1985, in the early days of screening blood supplies for the AIDS virus, the New York Blood Center sent a telex to the Red Cross of Switzerland, advising it that a small part of its shipment of Swiss blood appeared to have tested positive for H.I.V. The New York center said it had destroyed the suspect units. The Swiss Red Cross now concedes that that telex was the first warning that the virus that causes AIDS was present in Switzerland.