September 3, 1995

NEW YORKERS & CO. 2 Roman ruins, stark landscape: The ghosts that haunt industrial Williamsburg. INSIDE QUEENS 3 The ticket master of the U.S. Open makes sure the right names get the right seats. MOVIE CLOCK 27 What's showing at the local movie houses, today through Thursday. PLAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD 28 Celebrating Satchmo in Corona; a lecture on female curators; beach volleyball around town. GOOD EATING 28 A tour of the Upper East Side; the luxurious Stanhope Hotel; the cheerful Caffe Grazie. SOAPBOX 29 A teacher explains why she took a buyout. And letters.

AFTER the stock price of a small savings bank on Long Island rose two points overnight recently, Michael A. McManus Jr. thought to himself, "Here we go again." The jump, he believed, might foreshadow yet another of the mergers that have been changing the corporate structure of banking on Long Island and could alter the landscape for customers. Mr. McManus, the president and chief executive officer of Home Federal Savings Bank in Douglaston, Queens, said he was convinced that banks have helped to drive up the price of bank stocks in recent years as they have positioned themselves for takeover bids.

THE raging wildfire that tore through 5,500 acres of pine barrens in Westhampton left images and taught lessons that will be seared into the Island's collective memory long after the woods have recovered. Federal, state and local officials said the inferno -- so intense that its smoky plume was clearly visible in satellite photos, snaking south over the Atlantic Ocean -- showed the need for greater preparedness, better planning and the use of firefighting techniques usually associated with wilderness and national forests.

People in Queens don't apply for the New York Landmarks Conservancy's preservation loans -- and nobody knows why. Out of 63 low-interest loans granted by the Conservancy since the late 1980's, 23 have gone to residents of Manhattan, 35 to homeowners in Brooklyn, 2 to applicants in Staten Island and 3 to people in the Bronx. None have gone to residents of Queens.

IN a move that Gov. George W. Bush declared would make his state "a better and safer place to live," Texas last week overturned a 125-year-old law that banned its private citizens from carrying guns. A new law will allow any adult Texan without a history of mental illness or felony convictions to secure a permit to wear a concealed weapon. Texas thus becomes the ninth state in the past two years and the 28th overall to make carrying concealed weapons a basic right of the citizenry. But with the surge in these new laws, many a result of increasing fears of crime and Republican takeovers of state legislatures, one question has been strangely absent from the often emotional debate over their passage: