New York City

New York City is poised to finish the year with fewer than 1,000 murders for the first time in almost 30 years, authorities said Friday. Dramatic drops also were evident in the number of other serious crimes in the city, such as rape, robbery and assault, according to New York City Police Department statistics as of Dec 15. Not since 1968 has the annual number of murders stayed below 1,000. That year, the number was 986. The high was 2,245 murders in 1990.

The Long Island of fishing villages, potato farms and celebrity homes has had it up to here with the Long Island of tract housing, mall culture and Joey Buttafuoco. The eastern end of Long Island, which includes the exclusive Hamptons, is pressing to secede from its more suburbanized, low-rent neighbors to the west. Proponents cite environmental concerns; cynics call it snobbery.

Give us your frightened, your bewildered, your lost. Give us the Gootnicks. Fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, the young couple viewed New York City like millions of other tourists: with awe and trepidation. They had visions of corpses on the street, muggers on the subway and wisecracking natives who wouldn't give them the time of day. Instead they got Lucy Littlefield.

Whether it was Calvin Klein's '70s spin on '50s guyness, Donna Karan's ode to clothing-as-physiognomy or John Bartlett's fever dream of Havana cigars and humidor homoerotica, menswear has never been more anatomically correct than it was here last week when the spring 1997 collections hit the runways. "Fit-to-the-body" is what Esquire fashion director John Mather called it at a luncheon sponsored by his magazine. But, really, the word was "tight." As in shrink-wrapped. As in sexy.

When the towering floats and colorfully uniformed musicians take to the streets of New York City for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year, the Cypress High School Band & Pageantry will be among them. At a recent City Council meeting, amid music provided by the musicians, officials praised the band for being invited to perform at the parade Nov. 28.

Just 2 inches of snow Saturday put the winter of 1995-96 into the record books as New York City's whitest winter ever, the National Weather Service said. The 13th snowfall this winter broke the record for total accumulation: 63.2 inches, set in 1946-47. Before Saturday, 61.7 inches of snow had already fallen this winter in the city. Weather Service forecaster George McKillop predicted more snow in March. "The season's not quite over yet.

Carter Burden, 54, publisher and former New York city councilman who once owned the Village Voice. Burden also founded and expanded Commodore Media, which owns and operates 20 radio stations in New York, Connecticut, West Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania. He was known as a major benefactor of the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and the New York City Ballet. Burden served on the City Council from 1969 to 1978, when he lost to Bella Abzug.

So many major Italian designers have opened new boutiques on upper Madison Avenue in the last month that the always elegant street could be renamed Via Madison. An 18,000-square-foot Prada store at 70th Street will probably become the Prada for New Yorkers, who'll leave the tiny old 57th Street shop to the tourists. k.d. lang, wearing a men's Prada suit, and girlfriend Leisha Hailey shopped at the opening party Sunday.

The city of New York, joining a growing roster of states and municipalities, Thursday filed suit against the major tobacco companies to recover what Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says is $300 million a year in city funds spent coping with the ravages of smoking-related disease.

Like a lot of people, I was drawn to New York, where I lived in the late '80s and early '90s, in part because of Leonard Bernstein. I didn't move there with any illusions that Bernstein would be contributing much to the life of the city any more; his presence was still felt locally, but the world had become his arena.