Newsday from New York, New York • 69

BUSINESS A69 RENO AT LARGE Instead of a NY To Get Landmark Towers 15 years of design battles end in unity on plan for Columbus Circle complex By Harry Berkowitz STAFF WRITER After 15 years of battles by developers over what would be built at the Coliseum site on Columbus Circle, Time Warner yesterday unveiled plans for a giant structure with two glass-covered "parallelogram" towers on a curved stone base topped by lighted stainless steel "fins." The 2.8-million-square-foot structure overlooking Central Park, to be completed by fall of 2003, will surpass Rockefeller Center in its complex mix of uses and rival the Empire State Building in total space. The design had to please so many different private, cultural, community and government players and fulfill so many different functions that at various points it became a nightmare to sort it all out, some of the parties involved said after a news conference held in front of the Manhattan site's half-demolished 44-year-old New York Coliseum. But in the two years since Time Warner and the developer Related Cos. won the right to build on the 3.4-acre acre site, owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the various parties managed to work out differences while retaining plans for corporate headquarters and office space, hotel rooms, condominiums, a jazz hall, TV studios and a shopping mall. The proposed $1.7 billion structure's overall design and the 55-story, 750-foot towers are to be much more modern than the architecture in some previous proposals and less futuristic than in others, while echoing the twin-tower silhouettes of some classic Central Park West apartment buildings.

"Everyone realized the site and opportunity were much too important to settle for just a collection of compromises," said Joseph Rose, the New York City Planning Commission's chairman. "It will be timeless rather than a retro design," said David Childs, the chief architect from Skidmore Owings Merrill. Time Warner president Richard Parsons said the complex will be called AOL Time Warner Center, assuming the merger of the two companies goes through, even though America Online will likely have a relatively minor presence. Time Warner will have about 2,400 employees at the site, plus studio space for CNN and CNNfn. AOL has 6,000 employees in Dulles, Va.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani predicted the complex The following are corrections for Newsday's annual Top 100 Public Companies special report that appeared June 5. Adecco, a Swiss staffing company with North American headquarters in Melville, was omitted from two rankings. With 2,600 employees on Long Island, it should have been been ranked 10th on the list of local divisions of public companies that are based elsewhere. Adecco also should have been ranked 26th among all Long Island employers. As a result, in both tables, companies with fewer employees should have been ranked one notch lower.

The Nassau Health Care Corp. was omitted from the list of largest employers. The public-ben- At Its Core, the Law Must Be Immune To Partisan Thought The average age of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court is about 67, the youngest being 48, the oldest, 80. Only one is a baby boomer, while six are eligible for Social Security old-age benefits.

Six were appointed by Republicans, four by Ronald Reagan, and some are of an age when in many states they'd be subject to retesting to determine their continued competency to drive. It's the profile of a group you might expect to be mounting the ramparts to declare that the cultural revolution of the youth-crazed 1960s was null and void, that the "law and order" restoration promised by every Republican president since Nixon had finally been accomplished. Getting tough on crime, rolling back the liberal decisions of the Warren Court was, after all, the principal reason the right wing has salivated for a conservative majority on the court. But give a group of old folks time to stew in their accumulated wisdom and they do the damndest things. With a golden opportunity to overturn the Miranda ruling this week, the court voted 7-2 to reaffirm it.

This is the equiva- Architect's rendering of AOL Time Warner Center planned for New York Coliseum site at Manhattan's Columbus Circle. would become "another great signature landmark" of New York. At certain points during the past two years, the competing voices were rendering the design into a collage, with towers that were neither clearly stone nor glass, the parties involved said. "Everyone wanted to put in their two cents worth, and you had a building that was at one point like a camel," said Stephen Ross, chairman of Related the developer. "It had a little bit of this and a little bit of that and nobody was happy with the building." Over the years, a series of people, including Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman, had tried to develop the site and offered various designs, but their efforts fell to community protests and economic downturns.

The path now seems clear for the project, which is getting a record construction loan from GMAC Commercial Mortgage. The project will have 1 million square feet of office space, 203 luxury condominiums in the two towers totaling nearly 500,000 square feet, and 364,000 square feet of retail space, an area tht exceeds the size of the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue. The planned 249-room Mandarin Oriental hotel will be as big as the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue. efit corporation, which operates Nassau County Medical Center in East Meadow and the A.

Holly Patterson Geriatric Center in Uniondale, has 4,100 employees and should have been ranked 17th. The Swissair and Sabena airline offices in Melville rank 45th among Long Island divisions of companies based elsewhere. Their listing erroneously included Qualiflyer Customer Care Center, which does work for Sabena and Swissair but is an independent company. A description of Citigroup presence on Long Island omitted the Citibank Private Bank in Jericho and back-office operations of the financial-services company in Melville. lent of really getting skunked when you consider how often the present court has split 5-4 on a number of crucially important decisions.

The right of prisoners to remain silent, to have advice of a lawyer, to be uncoerced in confessions, was not only upheld, it bettered the majority it got in the 1966 decision Robert original when it was affirmed by Reno the Warren Court in a narrow 5-4 squeaker. Robert Reno Only the court's two most boringly predictable conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, dissented. A clearly apoplectic Scalia declared "the court flagrantly offends fundamental principles of separation of powers and arrogates to itself prerogatives reserved to the representatives of the These are precisely the words that could have been hurled at any number of Warren Court opinions by the crowd that came to call themselves "strict constructionists," people who had every right to think Chief Justice William Rehnquist is one of them and that by 2000 they were on the verge of taking over the court. But Rehnquist, appointed by Nixon and elevated to chief justice by Reagan, wrote this week's majority opinion. To have achieved only two votes in favor of overturning what was, to conservatives, one of the Warren Court's most infamously liberal decisions must be depressing to people who dreamed that the court was but a vote shy of a dependable conservative majority, and in some cases had actually achieved it.

This may lead them to conclude that there is no such thing as a safe appointment to the court and that by the time Clarence Thomas is 80, he may be doing weird things like siding with the rights of defendants, upholding affirmative action or advocating burning of the flag. Earl Warren is himself a classic example. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, confided before he died that appointing him chief justice was the worst mistake of his presidency. Yet Warren was not only a Republican but served 14 years as district attorney of Alameda County, Calif.

What more -friendly chief justice could Eisenhower have expected?.