Daily News from New York, New York • 116

aai7 nneo, By DAVID MEDINA lil 111 ljV-- -s children. For those interested in antiques, it should be noted that many of the mansion's furnishings and paintings are on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of the City of New York, which, incidentally, was situated there from 1923 to 1932. "I am pleased to open my home to the public in order to share with everyone the rich historic heritage and stately beauty of this house," Koch said. The mansion has never before been opened to group tours. The tours begin this Wednesday and will be held Monday through Friday between 10 a.m.

and 4 p.m. under the direction of Joan Tucker and volunteers from the Mayor's Office of Special Events. Groups or individuals interested in taking the tour can do so by calling (212) 248687. Mayor Kochs tight-fisted fiscal policies have finally hit home. In keeping with the trend toward having city properties that don't generate revenue pay for themselves, the mayor is opening up Gracie Mansion for public tours at $1.50 a head for adults and 75 cents for school children and senior citizens.

The money will be used to make some minor repairs on the place, a spokesman said. Visitors to the official residence at S8th SL and Blast End Ave. can see the spacious ballroom where Alexander Hamilton and James Fenimore Cooper shared drinks with Scottish sea merchant Archibald Gracie and where, on occasion, the mayor breakfasts with the city's political leaders. THEY CAN VIEW the guest room where both fieorge Washington and Jimmy Carter slept, and Gracie Mansion they can romp across the back lawn under the tree house built for former Mayor John Lindsay's Mew vests false shape for N.Y.'s finest ferns j. -v.

i I Frenchman ends transatlantic row Brest, France (UPI) Frenchman Gerard D'Aboville completed a solo 73-day row across the Atlantic yesterday, 35 miles north of Ushant Island off western France. D'Aboville. who began his trip in Cape Cod, decided not to try to reach the French coast after being driven northeast up the English Channel by winds and tides, naval authorities here said. Instead he opted for a "technical" crossing because his boat Captain Cook was damaged and the batteries in his radio were weak. He crossed the invisible line that qualified his effort as an official crossing shortly after noon yesterday.

al Services to purchase the new women's vests after he was confronted by a group of angry women officers during an awards ceremony last June. The department said that women who are satisfied with the old-style vests may continue to use them, but most female cops seemed pleased with the new ones. Said an officer in the EL 20th SL stationhouse: "I'm built differently than my male partner. If my trousers, my coat and my hat can be designed for my body, so should my vest" The women will be fitted for the vests at police headquarters tomorrow through Friday between 1 and 6 p.m. Women police officers will be fitted with new bulletproof vests this week to replace the bulky "Mae Wests" that sparked a confrontation with Mayor Koch last June.

The new vests, designed with adjustable straps to fit the contours of a woman's body, were produced by a New Jersey-based manufacturer who is supplying them for $90 apiece. There are currently 571 female cops on active duty and another 143 in the police academy. Although the unisex vests initially purchased for the department were financed through a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association fund drive. Mayor Koch ordered the Department of Gener WILLIAM UFORCE JR. DAILY NEWS Police Officer Betty Ribzel shows vest at E.

20th St. police station yesterday. Motherhood-more powerful than sisterhood he took down the plastic shower curtain, VN wrapped it around the filthy mattress and hoped that the fabric was strong enough to prevent lice from boring through. Her three kids, heavy eyed, tumbled onto the bed. They kept their clothes on.

She had checked into the hotel after 5 p.m. and was told that she could not get blankets until morning. She placed her sweatshirt on the other mattress and sat on it. She had no place to go and knew nobody to talk to; all of the life she lives was here in the room with her. Her name was Pat Chatam and she was 28, her three girls were 10, 9, 7.

and a room in a dirty hotel in Brooklyn, the JIMMY DRESLIH CO ALL ABOUT NEW YORK, people chase decoys and argue over illusions while Pat Chatam, from the years of failure and reality, sits on the edge of a bed and talks of life as it actually happens. "I was in high school when I had my first baby in Fayetteville she says. "I was 16. Then I still was in high school when I came up pregnant the second time. I didn't know about birth control.

Nowadays girls like me know about it, but they still don't think about it Same thing with abortion. I come from a religion that doesn't believe in abortion. I look at my kids now, I'm glad I got them. Black women don't want much to do with abortions. That's a white woman thing.

"You ask why? Black women- feel mostly alone anyway and a child means a lot Some of them think havin' a baby is an easy way out for them. Woman don't have to get off her behind and go out and get hassled by the world. Just have a baby and stay home. But I think mostly a woman is a scary type person. Black woman's afraid of being alone.

She knows she's going to be alone. Get a black man, you know he be gone someday. There must be 10 black women for every black man. For a woman, knowing somebody's there with you, even an unborn baby, is all she's got Being alone in an empty room, with the four walls to talk to, can run you crazy. Talking even to an unborn baby is nice.

"I THINK HAVIN' BABIES stops you from commitin' suicide. I was just saying before to the kids, 'You see where we are and how hard of a time momma's had? Without the kids I wouldn't make it here. Be a suicide someplace. Whole lot of black women would be gone if they didn't have kids to keep them from jumpin' in front of a car. "You're asking where all the black men go? A -whole lot of them die.

I was still in high school when a boy named Woodrow was shot at a club over some girl. We all went to the funeral and cried. He was the first one to die. After that wow, David Jones got shot then a boy James got shot dead. "Then you had them going to prison.

Charles McDonald went way to Raleigh men's state prison. He was the first I knew. He's dead now, I was told when I was home. He sure wasn't the last to go to prison. "When you do live with a black man, he's been cut down so low all his life that he has to have a baby.

He needs it as a brag off because he never done anything that got noticed before in his life. He makes a baby, he can walk around and say, 'Look at what I They been done so long that they're not about to stay with no family. The man cuts out. See the girls here? Their father left them. He don't even see them anymore.

He had his time to brag off on them and now he's gone." PAT CHATAM TOUCHED her oldest girl. "She spotted the father one time and he told her he lived in South America." "South Carolina," the girl said. "Might as well be South America," the mother said. "Where did you see him?" the girl was asked. "At the corner store back home." "Do you like him?" "Kind of." she smiled.

Her sister giggled. Pat Chatam said, "I guess it's a different way being a white woman. You see them, going around making all kinds of noise about abortion. They got the time to go around doing it because they don't have to be minding no kids. Don't mean nothing to a black woman.

We don't want abortions. "The ERA? Now what's that? Oh, now I know what that is. That's another white woman thing. Every black woman's against it The ERA, that has to do with putting white women in jobs. White women taking jobs away from black men.

No black woman's for that Black women don't like abortions. That's all white women's business. Blacks got no say in it" She looked down at the kids. ''Sunday night I'll wash out what they have on and then I'll put them in school Monday." 8 a to i ii i in n. I i rent paid by welfare, was 1 her address.

On her first day in New York, she arrived at Penn Station at 11:30 p.m. on a train from Fayetteville, N.C. She and her children slept in the station. On the next day, the city's social services sent her to the hotel in Brooklyn with $140 for a week's rent an infested room, and $58.80 for a week's food for her and the children. She enters the city at the bottom, without even a paper bag of extra clothes, and she immediately becomes one of the supremely powerful: She and her children are now among the 735,000 who receive Aid to Dependent Children payments from New York's social services, aid that makes up the bulk of the city's one billion, two hundred million dollar welfare Much of the city's financial trouble, and nearly all of the fear that continues to change New York everyday, begins with this ocean of poor whose waters are so uncharted..