As New York City's desperate leaders last week prayed for billions of federal dollars to stave off financial ruin, New York Bureau Chief Laurence Barrett entered his seventh month of directing coverage of his home town's woes. The assignment took him over familiar ground: born and raised in The Bronx, Barrett covered city hall for the now defunct Herald Tribune from 1959 to 1962.

Many of the city officials he knew on his old beat remain in high positions in city government. One of them, Mayor Abraham Beame, was director of New York's budget when Barrett first met him. "When I was growing up here and later covering city government," Barrett recalls, "New York was a proud town, an 'anything is possible' kind of place. No one was thinking about the unthinkable --that New York would be unable to pay its bills." Still, the city's current agony has an element of dej`a vu: in 1965, when Beame was losing his first mayoralty race to John Lindsay, Barrett published his first and only novel, The Mayor of New York. Its protagonist, Barrett's fictional mayor, was forced from office after proposing an unsuccessful master plan to save his financially hard-pressed city.

Barrett's reporting on the roots of the city's current crisis was supplemented by Correspondents Marcia Gauger and Robert Parker, who analyzed the city's most expensive programs--welfare and hospitals. Around the U.S., correspondents reported on the shivers that New York's threatened bankruptcy is sending through national financial markets. Says Associate Editor Frank Merrick, who catalogued the effects on other cities trying to borrow in order to meet expenses: "There's a virtual fruit basket of problems. The rot of the Big Apple could spoil a whole bunch of cities." From Washington, Correspondents David Beckwith and John Stacks cabled reports on the debate over extending federal aid, while Reporter-Researchers Allan Hill and Marta Dorion combed the dense and often deceptive budgetary studies that measure the city's economic plight. Senior Editor Marshall Loeb edited the cover package. Associate Editor Edwin Warner, who has written most of our previous New York crisis stories, outlined long-range reforms to keep the city solvent. Past chairman of his Upper West Side block association, Warner comments: "Part of the solution will come from New Yorkers who have learned to cope with the city's problems by working to improve their own neighborhoods."

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