February 26, 1997

A NUMBING shock hit Joan Davis when she learned about the shootings at the Empire State Building. She worked there, years ago, at an accounting firm. When horror descends on the familiar, the mind rushes to fill in the blanks. ''I wanted to know the facts,'' she said. ''What happened? How many were hurt? And, as always, where do they get the guns?''

Not every 36-year-old freshly arrived in Manhattan is immediately invited to dinner (and provided with a tuxedo) by Ralph Lauren, or to a lunch given by the Vogue editor Anna Wintour for Katharine Graham, or to an opening of the Byzantium exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or to an evening of pizza with a clutch of New York intellectuals pondering the future of American labor. And, of course, not every 36-year-old new to town says he would like to run for United States Senate someday. But not everybody is George Stephanopoulos, the former Presidential adviser and thinking woman's sex symbol, who is withdrawing from what he has called ''the most powerful drug I've ever experienced'' -- the 7:30 A.M. White House staff meeting -- to start a new life, more or less, in New York.

OVER the years, I'd tasted and enjoyed a few bottles from a California winery called Renaissance. I'd even noticed the odd appellation: North Yuba County. But I never bothered to look it up. Then I read James Halliday's comments on Renaissance in his excellent ''Wine Atlas of California'' (Viking, 1993).

Someone is poisoning geese and pigeons at Glen Rock Park, officials said yesterday. Since late January, officials have found 17 carcasses of Canada geese and pigeons, Peter Both, manager of the park's environmental center, said. All had been fed millet and wild sunflower seeds laced with a pesticide, he said.

It was a show of corporate might and razzle-dazzle, with equal parts of boastfulness and pomp, as the Walt Disney Company used its substantial skills today to entertain roughly 10,000 people gathered at a hockey arena for the annual shareholders meeting. And then Michael D. Eisner, at what should have been one of his greatest moments, deflated the excitement. After patting himself on the back for two and a half hours, Mr. Eisner, the company's exceptionally self-confident chief executive, created one of the oddest moments in the history of the company. He acknowledged that hiring his old friend Michael Ovitz as his president, which he had characterized 18 months earlier as one of his finest decisions, had been a personal error of judgment that had cost the company perhaps $90 million in severance payments.

Two Columbus Circle, the eccentric 10-story building that was put up for sale by the city as part of the effort to redevelop the southwest corner of Central Park, has attracted seven proposals for new uses, ranging from a spiritual retreat to a complex of Spanish language radio stations. Details of the proposals are being withheld under a blanket of confidentiality by the city's Economic Development Corporation, which is conducting the sale, but the agency has provided sketchy descriptions to a committee of Community Board members from the Upper West Side in hopes of heading off neighborhood opposition.

Cable television and satellite companies around the country were roiled yesterday by the news that Rupert Murdoch had agreed to invest $1 billion in a new satellite service that could be the first full-fledged competitor to cable in its three-decade history. In the deal, which was announced on Monday, Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation and the Echostar Communications Corporation will fold their respective direct broadcast satellite services into a single venture. The service would combine Mr. Murdoch's internationally known Sky satellite-television brand name with Echostar's 430,000 United States subscribers, but experts said it could be far more than the sum of these parts.

Art lovers and curiosity seekers spent $354,000 at two recent auctions of works belonging to the Port Authority, officials said yesterday.

Clear Channel in Deal To Buy Billboard Company Clear Channel Communications, a big broadcaster, agreed to buy Eller Media, a closely held billboard advertising company, for $1.15 billion in cash and stock. The transaction, which analysts said had been rumored for weeks, was announced after the stock market closed. Earlier, shares of Clear Channel rose 5.4 percent. $(Page D3.$) Retail Results Above Forecasts Several retailers announced earnings that were generally higher than expected, though forecasts had been lowered during the holiday shopping season. The stocks of many retailers, including Wal-Mart, whose earnings rose modestly, were sharply higher. $(D3.$)

The longtime private secretary to a patriarch of Mexico's governing party has told American authorities about a series of dealings between narcotics traffickers and high-ranking political leaders, including members of the family of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The former secretary, Magdalena Ruiz Pelayo, has provided the most detailed accounts to date about the extent to which Mexico's drug barons have corrupted politicians in the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

President Clinton two years ago personally approved a plan under which the Democratic Party rewarded some top donors and fund-raisers with meals, coffees, golf outings and morning jogs with him and with overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, to ''energize'' them for the coming Presidential campaign. ''Ready to start overnights right away,'' Mr. Clinton recommended in a handwritten note for his staff that he attached to a memorandum sent to him by Terence McAuliffe, then the Democratic finance chairman.

From beneath a black velvet top hat, a man who called himself Prince Vlad Marco smiled and rubbed a skull ring on his right hand yesterday as the New York City Council passed a bill legalizing and regulating tattooing in the city for the first time in more than 35 years. ''A lot of people like me, for a long time, have had to be kind of underground about tattoos,'' Mr. Marco said. ''This is the 1990's in New York, the capital of the world. And it's illegal to get a tattoo? I mean, come on.''