Daily News from New York, New York • 239

TJNKA'fsEWsT JANUARY1 12, 1975. UIBUJ A ream "IV 2 Artist's conception of Roosevelt Island tramway Which way are things really going? Project's Awakening ROOSEVELT ISLAND, a $325 million urban showpiece in the East River, opens in April, two months or so too late to save the job of its chief patron, Edward Logue. Logue was dismissed unceremoniously last week as head of a real estate empire called the New York State Urban Development Corp. The announcement came in the course of Gov. Carey's State of the State message.

The governor did, however, make a protocol phone call to the man a few hours earlier. "The situation requires an immediate change In the top management of UDC," Carey said. How immediate was unclear, but Logue said he was going, Carey's office said he was going, and when the going gets tough, even the very tough must get going. In the end, the bankers were calling the shots, many of them reportedly appalled at some of the agency's excessive habits, the high overhead and the high risk; the bankers' confidence was bearish, and so Carey said management of a $2 billion enterprise requires a "fiscally sound approach." The knock was clear: Logue could build, could assemble a competent staff, could take a number of consequential gambles, go to the brink a couple of times, but he could do nothing that would arouse the financial community. When he tried to "roll over" loans a common practice of borrowing to pay off other borrowingduring the current economic crunch, the banks demanded too high a price.

From the evidence it's clear that he was relying on the opening of Roosevelt Island to solidify his position, to win over the bankers and his critics, but he ran out of time. And money. A Semi-Big Deal The UDC's mandate was large, though not as large as Robert Moses' monopoly of agencies at his peak. The UDC was conceived in 1967 and 1968 within the state Housing Division as a more efficient agency, empowered with its own financing, to build housing: and industrial plants. Rockefeller searched for a name in urban renewal and lured Logue down from Boston, where he had established a record as a doer.

Logue demanded that the agency have extraordinary powers: the right to build without regard to local zoning, building codes or the local political climate. It was the first of his gambles, and he got it, along with a sizable salary a year). He also got a Rockefeller largesse $176,500 in gifts and loans to ease his move here. The suspicion from the outset was that he wanted a project that could become an urban showcase, a vision of the future that would show that cities can be liveable, the races mixed, the schooling novel and the architecture original, without cars, pollution and, perhaps most of all, without dogs. The gamble of Roosevelt Island is whether a sliver of land two miles long and 800 feet fl POINT OF VIEW By OWEN MORITZ When Logue gambled on trying to build 900 federally subsidized units in northern Westchester County in 1973, his real troubles began.

and the economy did us in" said a close aide.) Logue wanted to be an urban development agency, not just a big-city one. But the fuss was too great in Westchester, and Logue never got the chance to build because his patron. Nelson Rockefeller, pulled the rug out from under him. Rockefeller agreed with the suburban-dominated GOP Legislature to cut back the agency's powers, even ar the UDC's yearbook was off the press with a stout defense of the Westchester project. The agency got caught with its plans down.

Still More There were other factors. The Nixon administration of housing subsidies staggered the agency, even though it came into 1974 with a good record 33,000 new housing units around the state, industrial development that gained jobs, a new football stadium for Buffalo, a new convention center for Niagara Falls, considerable housing the city and, of course, the projects of 2,100 units housing 5,000 people on Roosevelt Island. The agency has an extraordinary number of architeitural awards to its name. At the same time, its operations were costing $1 million a day. But the impression remains that Logue and the UDC were buying time until the Big One in the East River was sealed and ready to go.

It's ready to go, but the agency has lost a lot of its luster and a lot of its clout and now it's losing its leader. A task force last month suggested the 1975 Legislature reduce UDC's bending capacity by $400 million and a number of projects be transferred to other agencies. Caught in the shuffle is the second stage some 2,900 units of Roosevelt Island. wide (Robert Moses once suggested the place be used for a cemetery) can be that visionary project, replete with a free electric bus plying its spine of roads, a pneumatic waste-rem oval system, schools packaged within carefully designed buildings, and whether it can sell. To overcome the island's inaccessibility until a subway link is ready in 1981, some bright people came up with a three-minute cable tramway ride between the island and Second Ave.

and 60th St. Some real estate people doubt that the island will sell; others question so stark an investment, now put at $325 million, but unlikely to be considerably more. By April, we'll see and know. The UDC was given the island (then going by the name of Welfare Island; marketing analysis later concluded it would sell a lot better as Roosevelt Island) by the Lindsay Administration in 1969 in an old-fashioned horse trade. In return, UDC had to take some weird building sites and build on them, using its resources.

Those developments have long since been built and some of them are quite handsome. Over the years, the UDC has used its zoning powers selectively. It overrode local opposition outside Rochester to build a development that had the wide support of greater Rochester's civic leaders. It provided the New York City Housing Authority with trailers to house relocated families in Brownsville in the face of the city's zoning laws, which prohibit trailers. Baffle of fhe Sexes Goes On: Whaf's he Difference? tial tasks, those that require perceptions of objects in space.

That superiority appears in adolescence and increases through the high school years. Mathematically Speaking Finally, boys are better than girls at mathematics. The difference appears at about aee 12 or 13. and male By EDWARD EDELSON THE DIFFERENCES between men and women used to be the subject of jokes. Now they are the subject of serious scientific study and noisy debate as the drive for female equality makes the issue of sex differences of prime importance, both socially and economically.

So the publication of a book that tries to give the latest word on sex differences is important. Two psychologists (both women), Eleanor Emmons Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, have compiled such a book, "The Psychology of Rex Differences," published by Stanford University Press. The book is not based on the authors' research but on a collection of 1,400 studies in which scientists tried to determine how boys are different from girls. The book has ammunition for both tides in the current war of the sexes. Male chauvinist pigs, for example, wili be discouraged to learn that girls are not more suggestible than boys.

As far as scientists can tell, the book says, "In face-to-face situations where there is social pressure to conform to a group judgment about an ambiguous situation there are usually no differense in susceptibility." About Women's Lib And women's liberationists who believe that today's society crushes the self-esteem of girls get no support in the book. "Boys and girls are very similar in over-all self-satisfaction and self-confidence throughout childhood and adolescence," the authors report. They add, however: "Ths sexes do differ in the areas where they report greatest self-confidence: girls rate themselves higher in the area pt social competence, while beys more often see themselves as strong, powerful, dominant, potent." Indeed, the authors say, scientists so far have been able to detect only four "fairly well established" differences between the sexes. Firs, males are more aggressive than females, both physically and verbally. Males show more aggression from the time when social play begins, at about two and a half years of age, and they stay more aggressive at least through the college years; there is no data on older adults.

Second, girls have better verbal ability than boys. The difference shows up at the age of 11 and increases "through high school and possibly beyond." Girls are better both at verbal tasks that require understanding, such as creative writing, and at such simple verbal chores as spelling. Third, boys are better at visual-spa cal skills increase faster than female skills form then on. And that's it. The authors list a lot of areas 5n which information is not available for example, whether girls are more fearful and timid than boys, whether one sex is more competitive than the other, whether girls are more passive than boys, whether one sex has a monopoly on nurturing "maternal" behavior.

Argue all you want, there is no sound scientific information on those points to settle the arguments..