September 14, 1995

BROADWAY in SoHo may have gone grandly mainstream, but the excitement has just moved east, to a one-and-a-half-block stretch of Lafayette Street just below Houston Street. Stylewise, SoHo's eastern border has suddenly become a stretch of white water in an otherwise placid industrial zone. In this neighborly enclave of home furnishings and clothing shops, one can find the dizzying iconoclasm that used to characterize SoHo.

BEHIND the facade of a traditional-looking four-bedroom house in Jamaica Estates, Queens, the soothing sound of the "Christian pianist," Dino Kartsonakis, plays on an elaborate stereo system. "At home we listen to cool-out music," says the owner, the Rev. Joseph Simmons -- Reverend Run of the rap group Run-DMC. Mr. Simmons, at the breakfast counter of his black, white and red art-deco-style kitchen, is trying to get his 5-year-old son, Jo-Jo, to stop gulping fruit juice. Nearby are his daughters, Vanessa, 12, and Angela, 7, and his 5-month-old son, Daniel. Jo-Jo starts to cough. "Stop drinking it so fast," Mr. Simmons admonishes him, as his wife, Justine, pats the child's back.

The final defendant in the 1993 killing of a Newark detective in the Essex County Courthouse pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiracy to murder, The Associated Press reported. Kevin Mattox of Newark admitted that he had agreed to drive the getaway car for Al-Damany Kamau, who was convicted in May in the murder of Detective John Sczyrek, said Clifford J. Minor, the county Prosecutor.

For more than 10 years it has largely been an empty shell on Columbus Circle, an unattractive, windowless block of a building that was the subject of bitter battles among environmentalists, developers and city officials. Today, something is finally happening with the New York Coliseum, but not the gargantuan residential and commercial project that Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mortimer B. Zuckerman proposed a decade ago. The Coliseum is reopening as what it was designed to be in 1954, a home for commercial trade shows in Manhattan.

It has been nearly a year since Yoko Miyamoto ordered her two-story cedar house from a company in Seattle, and more than four months since the pieces started arriving on flatbed trucks at this cool mountainous resort. But the three-bedroom alpine house is now nearly complete, and it is American through and through: stained cedar on the outside, panoramic windows, a sturdy wood frame. Even the insulation and sheetrock were shipped from Seattle.