Newsday from New York, New York • 51

4 ft ft ft i i il ft i ft a ft to to- 4 to to to to 35 ftK i Battle Heats Up Over Antismoking Campaign By Paul Moses STAFF WRITER The people who brought you a mock Marlboro Man subway ad are being blocked from posting a new antitobacco message that tells black people, First they made you pick it, now they want you to smoke it. Gannett Transit, which holds the Metropolitan Transportation Authority contract for subway advertising, said yesterday that it rejected the ad because its sponsor is allegedly responsible for widespread vandalism of cigarette ads. But Joe Chemer, president of SmokeFree Educational Services, charged that Gannett was caving in to pressure from tobacco companies that are mqjor subway advertisers. He said Gannett continually tries to find excuses for not running his ads. Chemer said he wanted to buy space for 6,000 new ads, or one in each subway car.

The new ad is intended to provoke the African-American community in New York City to outrage, he said, adding that blacks have the highest rate of cigarette addiction and lung cancer in the country. Gannett Transit president Rick Del Mastro said the advertisement was rejected because cigarette ads on the subway continue to be defaced with antismoking Tower Owners By Barbara W. Selvin STAFF WRITER Husband-and-wife developers David and Jean Solomon seemed to be on their way to a major real estate coup when they built two Times Square office towers at the same time in the late 1980s but the coup has failed, at least for now. Earlier this week, the Solomon-led partnership that owns 750 Seventh at 49th Street, filed for bankruptcy. The partnership for 1585 Broadway, at 47th Street, filed last month.

The buildings themselves are almost empty, with just 11 of 76 floors leased between them. Those 11 floors are at 1585 Broadway, where there is one tenant, the law firm of Proskauer Rose Goetz Mendelsohn. A law firm that leased at 750 Seventh dissolved and vacated its space late last year. David Solomon attributed the problems with leasing solely to the citys real estate situation and the national recession or depression." Both buildings were designed by big-name architects and, Solomon said, were completed on time and under budget, making them solid, attractive properties once the stickers printed by SmokeFree Educational Services. I remove thousands of these stickers a day, Del Mastro said.

Our commitment is to that cause, not to that organization. Gannett has contacted other health groups to get antismoking ads, he said. Chemer responds that its common for health groups to print stickers, and that he cant be held responsible for how theyre used. Gannett is desperately searching for excuses to rqject our ads. In 1990, the SmokeFree group ran a subway poster depicting a skeletal cowboy riding through a graveyard beneath the heading, Come to where the Cancer is.

The poster, designed by a 12-year-old girl, was rejected by Gannett on grounds that its large area of white space made it prone to graffiti. After city Consumer Affairs Commissioner Mark Green objected publicly and newspapers editorialized, Gannett Transit agreed to run the ads. Green said yesterday that he didnt want to comment on the specific ad Chemer is now proposing, but is clear that a disproportionate percent of the billboards around black communities promote smoking. Chemer said the slogan in the new ad is used in a rap music commercial promoted by the California Health Department The ad pictures a white skeletal Marlboro man with a pretty, 10-year-old black girl and a cemetery in the background. Go Bankrupt market turns around.

A source dose to the situation said the Solomons and their creditors are near an agreement on restructuring their debt This would lower the Solomons interest costs and allow them to reduce rents. The asking rent per square foot is now in the mid-SOs, Solomon said. Look, these are very difficult times for a great many people," Solomon said. But we are working very positively with all of our lenders to create value in the assets. Mortgages on both buildings are in foreclosure, although those actions have been stayed by the bankruptcy filing.

Citibank is the lead lender in the behind 750 Seventh. The Bank of Montreal and Toronto Dominion bank lent about $340 million on 1585 Broadway. Both buildings received substantial tax breaks from the city under its Industrial apd Commercial Incentives Program. The source said the Solomons hope to emerge from the bankruptcy action in control of the properties, although the lenders will probably get an equity stake in return for reducing the debt. i- 2 00 No Proof of Bank Bias, Says Fed The economy was in the doldrums as 1 991 ended with little sign of life anywhere, the Federal Reserve said yesterday in a gloomy assessment of business activity around the country.

The Feds latest survey of business conditions, compiled from information supplied by the Feds 12 regional banks, depicted a stagnant economy with little suggestion of a rebound outside of modest gains in housing sales. Activity was lackluster as the year drew to a dose, the central bank Baid. The survey noted disappointing Christmas Bales by department stores, a slump in manufacturing activity and little demand for new loans at banks outside of a rush by home-owners to refinance mortgages. The Fed said business executives anticipate the economy will improve by midyear, but they had little firm evidence on which to base that expectation. A federal official said theres no firm evidence that banks discriminate against minorities, despite statistics showing blacks and Hispanics are about twice as likely as whites to be turned down for mortgage loans.

John LaWare, one of the governors who sets monetary policy for the Federal Reserve System, said that those numbers dont tell the whole story. It is not possible to determine from the data alone whether an individual institution or groups of lenders are discriminating unlawfully against minority applicants, LaWare said. Housing starts sank to a 46-year low during 1991, but there were Bigns at year's end of improvement in the industry that often leads the economy out of recession, government figures showed. Although new construction of single-family homes and apartments plunged 14.9 percent during the year, the Commerce Department said, both starts and applications for building permits were on the rise in December. In the Northeast, starts advanced 13.9 percent in December.

But for the year, tarts had fallen 14 percent. Honda Motor Co. is recalling 25,055 cars in Japan to check for a defective part that could cause oil leaks. In addition, Honda has sent letters to 45,344 owners in other countries. Local dealers will check the part on those cars free of charge, said Hideo Sato, a Honda spokesman.

The recall involves Accord, Ascot, Prelude, Legend, Civic, Civic Ferio and Integra models built between Nov. 5 and Dec. 12 last year, Sato Baid. The Supremo Court was urged by a North Dakota lawyer to let states tax mailorder sales a ruling that would have enormous financial impact for consumers, businesses and Btate treasuries. But an attorney for a mail-order company told the justices they should reaffirm a 25-year-old decision barring states from collecting such taxes.

The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino expects to become the third of Donald Trumps three casinos to file a bankruptcy plan. Trump attorney Joseph Fusco told the New Jersey Casino Control Commission that the casino intends to file a pre-packaged bankruptcy 45 days after bondholders are solicited on the bond offer. Citicorp, trying to lower costs in the face of huge losses, plans to cut more jobs this year on top of the 9,000 elminated in 1991. The nations biggest banking company is trying to slice another $600 million of its net costs this year. Compiled from staff and wire reports Weapon Too Terrible to Use: Trade RENO from Page 32 Americans imagine the Japanese are 10 feet tall despite statistics showing the average American worker is still more productive than the average Japanese worker.

The Japanese do make mistakes. Didnt Honda just this week announce that 70,399 vehicles, sold in Japan and worldwide, may have defective oil pressure switches, manufactured by two Japanese companies, which could cause the engines to burn up? Tsk, tsk, Honda. Have you got a bunch of lazy illiterates inspecting your oil pressure switches? Oh, well, the vomitus outburst by the speaker of the Japanese lower house ought to at least cancel out the of face caused by our presidents unfortunate experience at the prime ministerial dinner table. Certainly it should reassure us that the asinine stupidity of some of the leading Japanese politicians is as much of a drag on the Japanese economy as, say, having Dan Quayle as a vice president depresses our own confidence. Still, the present situation is especially dangerous because President Bush has already promised and declared that he will do what is "necessary to get himself re-elected.

And if this means having his limousine run over old ladies or barking gratuitously provocative statements in Japans direction, who of us imagines old read-my-lips wont keep his promise this time? make the Japanese suffer, that we could induce a terrible recession in the Japanese economy. But this might be mild compared to what we could bring on ourselves if this provokes a collapse of Japanese stock prices, a convulsion in Japans real estate market and a consequent flight of Japanese capital from American shores. The cost of servicing the national debt alone could then become intolerable. Imagine the condition of the U.S. real estate market and banking system, already in deep trouble, if Japanese investors, desperate for liquidity, were forced to dump all their U.S.

holdings to cover asset losses at home. And if faced with a diminished U.S. market, the Japanese would, of course, start exporting like crazy to the rest of the world, competing more heavily with the U.S. in Asia and Europe and generating trade frictions all over the place. This, of course, is a worst-case scenario.

It will take more than a few insults, congressional threats and presidential fiascoes to get us to such a calamity. But trade wars have a way of breaking out in minor increments, in incidents here and incidents there which put events on a irreversible course. One of our naturally, is that too many i i to 1 I.