Newsday from New York, New York • 25

xjrr. j. Krp4v-. JH ffiJIifelli. Phone Items to (212) 303-2850 MANHAnAN CLOSEUP Remembering Them in Herald Square Newaday Mart Hinqjoaa Martinique portico, above, and the neighborhood reflected, top photo.

By Jessie Mangaliman The sound of children playing would echo in the canyons of this neighborhood, which includes Macys, at all hours of the night alter the Bhoppers left the streets. On Greeley Square, a patch of traffic island with scraggly trees, where Broadway meets 32nd Street, the children of the Martinique Hotel used to play. It is mostly silent here at night now, in the neighborhood of what was once one of the citys largest welfare hotels, smack Hh in one of its busiest business districts. The hotel, hinting of former grandeur, is silent too, closed last year by the city. The .461 families who lived here have been relocated to city-owned apartments and shelters.

Mayor Edward I. Koch has announced the city will close four more welfare hotels, one each in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, in a plan to close all such welfare by the middle of next year. There were 62 welfare hotels in March, 1987. Now, there are 32. I have to say I was glad mostly because that indicated the city was making Borne progress in eliminating welfare hotels, said Lee Sachs, a filmmaker who lives on the ninth floor of the McAlpin, where he can see the Martinique from his window.

I have to say that I think a lot of people feel a little more secure, said one neighborhood resident. The sad fact is welfare hotels do draw druggies. When the Martinique closed, we seemed to have eliminated some of that problem from the neighborhood. The sounds of children have been replaced here by the sounds of construction. Abraham Strauss is building on the site of the old Gimbels department store on Herald Square.

The Herald Square subway station is being renovated. There is a new newsstand on Greeley Square. Construction awnings surround the 25-story McAlpin Apartments, a signpost of transformation. Its nice to hear children in the neighborhood, said Jim Brosseau, a free-lance writer. "It makes it feel like a neighborhood.

Still I hope theyve gone to a more humane environment. More than six months after the Martinique dosed, residents like Brosseau, people who work The But now, Raskob said, there more are pedestrians, whom she sees as potential shoppers. Thats what restaurateur Spiro Zisimatos sees, too, in his restaurant, the Diner on the Square, which he opened in a Martinique storefront eight months before the hotel closed. Business is picking up now, Zisimatos said. People are moving around the neighborhood freer.

They dont have that nervous feeling that they used to have when homeless people loitered." Residents of the Martinique loitered and littered in front of the hotel and on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, he said. Zisimatos also owns a deli across the street. But the bulk of the deli business has always been from the people who worked in the neighborhood, and not from residents of the Martinique, he said. The deli business is the same even without the Martinique while at the restaurant, there are more customers. The neighborhood has a different atmosphere," he said.

Elliot Willensky, executive director of the 34th Street-Midtown Association, explains it this way: Before there were a lot of reports of petty thefts. Thats an irritation that didnt help a business. Thats one of the reasons why the association was very concerned with finding alternative opportunities to house the homeless. Community Board 5, the district that includes the Martinique, once had the largest concentrations of welfare hotels, a fact protested by the Midtown South Preservation and Development Committee, a coalition of community groups. The coalition sued the city in state Supreme Court, accusing it of dumping" homeless in Midtown.

The lawsuit is pending. They (welfare hotels) were magnets for all kinds of social problems, said Rita Sklar, one of the founding members of the coalition. The most eloquent response Ive heard about all this is from Father Catir. He said: am to be a shepherd to my flock, and my flock includes the homeless, but everybody knows that if you have 20 sheep and one grazing area, they can not survive. To me that was the simple truth.

in the neighborhood, and merchants who do business here, are noticing the change. Its quieter, Sachs observed, fewer firetrucks, fewer sirens blaring. We used to have a lot of false alarms in the Martinique, said Fire Department spokesman Efraim Parilla. This neighborhood has a lot of problems aside from the Martinique, Sachs said. Its not a real neighborhood, first of all.

It just happens to be that there are some people living here. But there are changes. People are not out on the streets all night. There is a residual element of crackheads around the Martinique. In a way its a little less.

There are less people, he said. If there is overall community relief at the dosing down of the Martinique, there is also a hope that the homeless families who lived in the hotel found better homes elsewhere, a place where the children can play in real playgrounds. The number one benefit is that the residents found homes that are real homes, said Deborah Fong, spokeswoman for the McAlpin. The McAlpin, steps from the Martinique, is one of a handful of residential buildings amid the office buildings, small businesses and department stores. It was the businesses that first felt the change.

Its peoples perception, said Barbara Ras-kob, who works in the neighborhood and is president of the 34th Street-Midtown Association a business league. Society in general does not care to look at homeless people who are in serious personal trouble. They shy away from them. People tend to shy away from neighborhoods of welfare hotels. 2 5 8.