Daily News from New York, New York • 555

THE THIS WEEK ValuJet, the discount airline that grudgingly shut down amid federal safety concerns, will ask Congress to help it return to the skies. FRIDAY'S CLOSES DOW JONES 5,705.23 AMERICAN 584.95 500 666.84 NASDAQ MARKET 1,175.44 Veteran execs hired Ziff-Davis publishing hired three veteran magazine executives to work in its Internet and magazine businesses, the company said. Ziff-Davis, a unit of Softbank tapped Lawrence Burstein, former publisher of Conde Nast Publications' New Yorker and Self magazines and publishing director of Hearst Esquire magazine, to be senior vice president of consumer advertising for print and online publications. Alexandra Penney, a former editor in chief of Self, will be creative director at large. James Spanfeller, formerly publisher of Inc.

magazine, will be publisher of Yahoo! Internet Life, a print and online magazine about the global computer network. He will also oversee advertising for the magazine's World Wide Web site. Is 11 Center 's retail renaissance is under way By SOMA REYES rife, jshsates if Pump prices dip Prices at the nation's gasoline pumps fell 1.58 cents per gallon over the past two weeks, bringing the decline to nearly 3 cents since the peak late last month, according to the Lundberg Survey released yesterday. The average price for all grades, including taxes, was $1.35.28 per gallon on Friday, said Trilby Lundberg, whose survey monitors prices at 10,000 gas stations across the country. The price of unleaded regular gas at self-service pumps is leading the price decline.

It fell by 1.77 cents during the past two weeks, to an average of just under $1.29 cents per gallon. Midgrade unleaded averaged about $1.39 at self-serve pumps and premium unleaded $1.47. Ahead of schedule JON NASO DAILY NEWS BANK ON IT: liana Dreyer of Citicorp retail division, and Eugene O'Neill, of construction division, survey work at atrium. At right, artist's rendering of finished job. Daily News Business Writer There's more than bank business shaking at the Citicorp Center.

A retail revival of the Shops at Citicorp Center is under way, an effort that Citicorp Center officials hope will reposition Manhattan's East 50s as a destination neighborhood for tourists and New Yorkers. Without a strong retail component, the three-story shopping arcade on the ground level of the Citicorp Center has languished since its heyday in the '80s. Only Barnes Noble, which bought the lease from the now-defunct Con-ran's in 1994, has saved the retail plaza from becoming a ghost town. Now a $27 million renovation project has been started, as well as an effort to attract two more anchor tenants to join Barnes Noble and about a dozen smaller shops there by April, the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Citicorp Center, on E. 53d St and Lexington Ave.

The biggest challenge in renovating the arcade was to open the awkward space to give retailers more visibility and access. Except for Barnes Noble, all the shops were hidden from street view. When renovations end in November, the retail plaza's layout will be reconfigured to include street-level access to the shops, with new floors, ceilings and lots of lighting. And escalators, which obscured shoppers' views of the stores, will be resituated to give the plaza an airy, bright look. "We want New Yorkers and tourists alike to come here for superb retail," said liana Dreyer, Citicorp's vice pres- ident for retail operations.

"And to kick off their shoes and relax in the bright, airy atrium." Dreyer has even convinced Citicorp executives that decorative retail marquees and hanging vertical metallic banners will draw shoppers. Dreyer is armed with an array of demographics to woo retailers. There is a captive audience of 35,000 office workers within one block; 7,000 pedestrians pass through the Citicorp lobby daily, and 57,000 commuters take the Lexington Ave. subway on the corner each day. So far, Dreyer has signed leases with City Sports, a Boston-based sporting goods retailer; Cinnabon, a cinnamon bun chain; Gateway Newsstands; Silver Shoe Repair, and Houston's, a Nashville-based restaurant chain.

Deals are pending with a women's wear company and other retailers. Still, the retail plaza takes the form of a vertical mall, and that could be sticky for New York shoppers. The only successful vertical mall in the city is Manhattan Mall on 34th St "New Yorkers are not enamored of vertical malls," said retail consultant Alan Millstein. "Their success rate is little or none." But that doesn't deter Dreyer, whose vision goes beyond just redoing the retail plaza She has reached out to the Museum of Modern Art to mount shows and the numerous local hotels to put together a list of area highlights. And she's in talks with the city to install a computerized touch-screen at the atrium so shoppers can pay parking tickets and apply for dog licenses, for example.

"We will celebrate New York and be its ambassadors," said Dreyer. Kiwi Air said yesterday it planned to fly 51 of 61 scheduled flights today after the discount carrier agreed to suspend some of its flights due to problems involving its pilot training records. The employe-owned airline voluntarily agreed with the FAA to suspend 25 of its flights starting Saturday to address issues of its recordkeeping of pilot training. Of 250,000 people who are booked for future flights, fewer than 150 have canceled reservations, the company said. dflflDdDD BDQODflflS 0" Toms By DOUGLAS FEIDEN tax benefits and other incentives available to companies that occupy space in the district's older buildings.

DeVry says it will create about 150 full-time and 100 part-time jobs and offer a bargain-basement tuition Red-faced Bank of New York may get its knuckles rapped by the New York Stock Exchange for giving a group of Wall Street analysts first crack at sensitive news last week, experts said. The company is not facing serious charges of wrongdoing but the episode was another reminder that some big corporations have a habit of sharing information with analysts and leaving the news media arid the public in the dark until later. A check of various corporations and industries revealed that practices vary. Looking to score Former Pittsburgh Steelers football star Franco Harris has signed an agreement to buy Parks Sausage Baltimore's largest black-owned manufacturing company and the first black-owned business to offer public stock. Harris is seeking to save Parks Sausage, which opened in 1951.

i 1 ing technology and computer information systems. DeVry boasts that 91 of its graduates find technical jobs within six months and 2,000 of them work for New York companies like IBM, NYNEX and Eastman Kodak. DeVry has a total national enrollment of 29,333 and schools in Texas, Ohio, California, Missouri and Illinois. But it has never entered the New York market the closest it has come is Woodbridge, J. and the publicly traded company acknowledges it must approach the city differently.

"Typically, we put a campus on 15 acres of land with parking for 1,100 cars," said Dennis Keller, DeVry's chairman and CEO. "No way you can do that in New York. So we thought when in Rome do as the Romans do." "That's why we're creating a vertical campus for students to come by public transportation or walk or ride their bikes." Daily News Business Writer DeVry Institute of Technology, a national leader in adult technical education, has won permission to open a major school in New York and is scouting locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Illinois-based institute, which runs 14 for-profit colleges across the country, says it plans to develop a "vertical campus" for some 2,500 students in about 100,000 square feet by late next year or early 1998. The company is expected to identify a site with mass transit access by the end of the year, and it's already scouring midtown Manhattan, downtown below Canal St and downtown Brooklyn near the MetroTech Center.

Already, the competition for that campus has begun and lower Manhattan's business leaders may be off to a head start The Alliance for Downtown New York is preparing a presentation for DeVry, touting the lucrative $5,666 to the average student in its first full year of operations. DeVry got the green light to enter the state's educational market June 14 after a rigorous, three-year screening process when the state Board of Regents, by an 11-to-l margin, voted to let the firm award degrees in New York. The institute plans to offer career-oriented courses leading to bachelor's degrees in accounting systems, business operations, electronics engineer 1 1.