July 7, 1996

THE landlord is fighting a cold and an eye infection, and perhaps the betrayal of a dream. Landlords can be idealists, too, although tenants rarely think so. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Ravitch, who is 63, envisioned four architecturally handsome towers of rental apartments on the East River in a racially and economically integrated enclave that would throb with a sense of community. It would be a monument to the liberal imagination, and eventually would turn a liberal profit. It took him 10 years to get his plan approved, he said. It was called Waterside Plaza, and was built under the Mitchell-Lama laws, with limited profit for limited risk and affordable housing if tenants agreed to certain restrictions and were within minimum and maximum income levels.

The 11th international AIDS meeting opens here on Sunday with leading researchers' hopes as high as the sun-drenched mountains surrounding this Canadian seaport. Remarkable gains in using combinations of costly new and old drugs promise to slow the progression of AIDS, if not stop it in its tracks, and to allow many people infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, to live longer and healthier lives, the researchers said in interviews.

THE conversion van emerged in Southern California in the early 1960's when crusty beach bohemians modified their Volkswagen and Ford Econoline vans, adding beds in the back, gluing shag carpet to the floors, the walls and sometimes even the steering wheel and building in wooden consoles and tables. Naturally, it being California, the inevitable exterior treatments included alloy wheels, wooden bumpers and murals of, say, the Malibu Pipeline.

Undaunted by the 5-1 deficit he faced as he and Todd Martin fought to the finish in the fifth set of their tumultuous two-day Wimbledon semifinal on Center Court today, MaliVai Washington pulled off what surely felt like a miraculous 5-7, 6-4, 6-7 (6-8), 6-3, 10-8 upset of the last remaining seeded player on the men's side. The 20th-ranked Washington thus transformed his first appearance in a Grand Slam semifinal, and his first victory against the 13th-seeded Martin, into the reality of what had seemed like a dream when he entered this event as a 300-to-1 shot. He earned the right to play his first Wimbledon final, against someone he has never played before, Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands.

DURING the interval between the two rounds of the Russian presidential election, a somewhat morose Grigory Yavlinsky -- the reform leader who came in a weak fourth in the voting -- posed a question to an American correspondent he ran into at a party. "Tell me something," he asked nervously. "Have there ever been any politicians in the United States who were humiliated at some point in their careers but then came back to win the presidency?"