Daily News from New York, New York • 6

intra M1 iHH H'H PRHF hm? Ill 3 a Woody Carnegie's ghost One New Yorker's crusade to save another's legacy 3 If I SUSAN WATTS DAILY NEWS Filmmaker Woody Allen Is fighting to keep historic Carnegie Hill area free of a proposed skyscraper on E. 91st St On a bright New York morning, here is Woody Allen standing on the northeast corner of 91st St. and Madison. He is looking at an ugly one-story Citibank building, but the air is filled with other visions. In imagination, as Allen talks, we see a residential tower climbing high above the small bank.

It blocks the sun. It casts dark shadows. It narrows the feeling of space. It looms above us, slick and blank, and eating the sky. "We're fighting it because it just doesn't fit here," says Allen.

"It's not just the style, or the design. It's the scale." For several years, Allen has lived with his wife, Soon-Yi. and their two children in a neo-Georgian house around the corner from the Citibank branch. The Brooklyn-bom filmmaker is the most private of men, but here in the neighborhood called Carnegie Hill, he has become an activist. Again and again, he has joined his neighbors to appear before the Landmarks Preservation Commission to battle mutilations of the area's character.

He has been at rallies and meetings. He has made a short film at his own expense to dramatize the problem. "It's not about blocking the sun from my backyard," Allen says. "I hate the sun. And it's not about spoiling my view.

I have no view. It's about maintaining the feel of a special New York neighborhood." Carnegie Hill lies between Fifth and Third from 86th to 96th Sts. It is named for Andrew Carnegie, the Pittsburgh "prince of steel" who blended business ruthlessness with democratic idealism to become the most appealing of the 19th century captains of American capitalism. He would have loved Woody An immigrant from Scotland, Carnegie arrived in America in 1848 when he was 13, and after his father's death, went to work in a mill in Slabtown. As a boy, desperate for education, he once was turned away from a private library (there were no public libraries).

By the time he died in 1919, he had endowed 2,509 libraries in the English-speaking world, including 39 branches in New York. I can't imagine any of our current billionaires doing such a thing. In later life, Carnegie became a close friend of Mark Twain. I suspect he would have loved Woody Allen. "He lived right up there on the comer," Allen says, and we walk toward Fifth Ave.

Great stone mansions in the French style line the street, but the Carnegie building (now the Cooper-Hewitt museum) remains the most imposing in this neighborhood that now bears Carnegie's name. "It's an amazing building," Allen says. "Just look at it" The Carnegie mansion was designed with a facade of Georgian-style brick, garnished with Beaux-Arts ornaments and a granite balustrade, and is surrounded by sketchbooks of young American architects who had studied in Rome. Ornament and filigree, terra cotta and carved doors: Everything that the severe modernists of the Bauhaus dismissed as preposterous. In every case, the scale is human.

That scale is what unifies the diversity. "Come on, I want to show you something," Allen says. We turn into E. 92nd and Nos. 120 and 122 are before us.

They are made of wood, one of them (122) erected in 1859, the other in 1871. In those years, all of this was still rural Manhattan, full of farms and streams. The wolves were already gone, but the woods still moved with fox and wild porches of each house suggest a time when human beings actually managed to live dense lives without radio, television or the phonograph. Combined with all the other buildings, they shape a neighborhood that has that rare New York quality: visible memory. "I got involved because of the movies I make," says Allen.

"And I noticed that places where we shot 20 years ago were disappearing. I'd say, when we were scouting locations, 'What about that street in the Village? Let's and it was gone." Certain streets that have that romantic feeling of Manhattan that I like And they were being lost." The struggle over the air rights above the Citibank building is thus both specific and general. The building itself is nothing; it was erected in 1951, after the demolition of several Queen Anne-style town-houses. Across the street stands one of those white-brick horrors where single people live for a while, before marrying and departing for New Jersey. Down Madison at 90th St.a modem tower ris-i es 45 brutal stories above the street; up-i town at 94th there's another im-: mense Stalinist assault on sense and sensibility.

Enough already, say the Carnegie HilJ Neighbors, the group that Allen 'haf joined. The developers have come up with a revised plan, educing their prcr posed 17 stories tot 10. The neighbor want five. All are waiting for a decision from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. But one larger point should be clear! Such struggles are not restricted to the people of specific neighborhoods.

Carnegie Hill like Greenwich Village, sor Gramercy Park, SoHo, Inwood, or the Stanford White block in Harlem belongs to all New Yorkers. We who live elsewhere should be able to walk those streets on summer afternoons, to feast on visual delights, or to imagine vanished lives. All good ghost stories take place in houses, and in Carnegie Hill, the ghosts range from the Marx Brothers, who grew up in a now-demolished tenement at 179 E. 93rd to the banker Otto Kahn, who gave immense life to the Metropolitan Opera, and lived across the street from Andrew Carnegie. They are all part of the secret life of Carnegie Hill.

Listen to Woody Alien, he's speaking for them. And for the rest of us, too. E-mail: phamilleditnydailynews.com 300 square feet of gardens. When work started in 1898, this location was 20 blocks north of the great mansions of Fifth and most of the upper crust thought Carnegie was mad. The area (opposite the north end of the Central Park reservoir) was filled with shanties.

Goats roamed streets and woods. Carnegie cleared out the shanties, along with a riding academy and some tenements, and bought up the surrounding lots. "He wanted some control over the neighborhood," Allen says. "And he got spent $1.5 million on his New York mansion, which was finished exactly 100 years ago. With four stories above-ground, and three below (where the coal-powered heating system was installed), the mansion had 64 rooms tended by 42 servants.

He and his wife, Louise, moved into the house in 1902. To the east, other houses were already rising, because after 1891, the Third Ave. el had a stop at 89th St. Carnegie sold his own lots only to people who would build houses of distinction. "He had a sense of what he wanted it to be," says Allen, a century later.

"The light, the breeze A unified diversity We wander through the neighborhood, gazing at the marvelous ly eclectic range of architectural styles. Many are from the turn of the last century. Here are bits and pieces of the Loire Valley and the chateaus of Francois I. Here are hunks of the Mediterranean, brought home in the CM (0.