July 30, 1995

LIKE armored divisions clashing on the battlefield, two garbage trucks from Browning-Ferris Industries and three from the Pioneer Carting Corporation confronted each other shortly after midnight two months ago in front of the Delmonico Gourmet Food Market in midtown Manhattan. The trucks jammed Lexington Avenue, blocking traffic. "You think you guys can control this city?" yelled one of the Pioneer drivers, jumping down from his seat, waving his arms and spouting language that matched the contents of his truck. "This is our town."

In an eight-day period this spring, three small children in Connecticut died at the hands of adults they knew. Outraged and revolted, particularly by the rape and fatal assault of 9-month-old Emily Hernandez, Connecticut abruptly changed the way it handled child abuse cases. Since then, the state has become far more aggressive about removing abused children from their parents and placing them in foster care. Connecticut officials have shifted their focus from the preservation of families, backing away from the philosophy that governs child welfare in at least 35 other states, including New York and New Jersey.

New York University has canceled plans to build a $4 million, 10-acre athletic complex in Weehawken, N.J. One of the main factors the university cited was environmental costs. The site is contaminated with chromium, but the levels are not so high that the clean-up costs would be borne by the Federal Government, as N.Y.U. officials had hoped. Costs were also rising for the project, officials said, and the university's priorities have changed over the last three years. "It was going to be much more expensive than we thought, and we are very disappointed," said Virgil Renzulli, N.Y.U.'s director of public affairs. N.Y.U's decision not to go ahead with the project was first reported in The Weehawken Reporter, a weekly newspaper, last week.

IN its first major step following the first state takeover of a public-school system, a four-member panel appointed by the Board of Regents is to file preliminary plans tomorrow for reviving the academically and socially troubled Roosevelt district. The chairman of the panel, Dr. Daniel A. Domenech, said the task ahead would be arduous in a 2,800-student district where poorly maintained buildings and low morale are matched by a long slide in academic performance that places Roosevelt in the lowest ranks of schools in the state.

THE Gannett Company, the biggest newspaper company in the country, bought another 11 daily newspapers last week. Gannett already owned 82 dailies with a total daily circulation of more than 5.8 million. Not long ago, sales of newspapers to business behemoths had journalists and critics anguishing loudly about concentration of media power in a few grasping hands. Yet Gannett's purchase of Multimedia Inc. of Greenville, S.C., barely provoked a peep of protest.