April 3, 1995

Township council members want to raise money, but they would rather not raise taxes, at least not much. So they are weighing a plan to sell advertising space on park benches, tennis courts, fences, municipal vehicles, even trash cans. S T & L Advertising, a township-based firm that has been working with the council, says selling ads could bring in $225,000 a year. The council will review bid specifications next Monday. DAVID STOUT

In the early hours of March 26, as one of the town's mute swans sat guarding her eggs on her lakeside nest, she was clubbed with a baseball bat. Then her head was severed with a crosscut saw and thrown into the lake. Two men who live in a nearby motel and a 14-year-old boy have been charged.

The mountain bikers gathering at Mianus River Park were from all over, but they had one thing in common besides their fat-tired bicycles. They loved the quiet trails in the park, 215 acres of undisturbed woods in the heart of busy Fairfield County. "I lived on Cat Rock Road near here when I was growing up," Barry Biondo of Stamford said as he lifted two bicycles off the rack of his Porsche Carrera. "When I got my mountain bike, I remembered this and thought, 'Wow!'

The image of New Jersey for many drivers is one of refineries and smoke-belching stacks. So state officials are trying to register Route 29, which meanders along the Delaware River for 35 miles from Trenton into Frenchtown, as the state's first road in the Federal Scenic Byways program. Officials say the road, almost free of billboards, would need only minor landscaping and better signs directing tourists to parks and historic sites to be "scenic."

Ivan G. Seidenberg still regularly drops in on his pals at the old New York Telephone garage on Bronx River Avenue, where he started in 1966 as a cable-splicer's helper, fresh out of Evander Childs High School. Now that he's head of the whole company, Nynex, such visits could easily seem like the calculated effort of a chief executive to bond with his troops. But the linesmen and splicers who go out for coffee with Mr. Seidenberg -- some of whom started out with him in '66 -- insist he's the genuine article: the first born-and-bred New Yorker to run Nynex and the man who will lead the company's defense of its hometown franchise.