A City Without Newspapers..

Panic in Needle Park again. The junkies now share that defoliated triangle on Manhattan's Upper West Side with the dog walkers, but the city's notorious new scoop-the-poop law hit the books just as unions at the city's three major newspapers hit the bricks. So Needle Parkers, like animal owners elsewhere in the city, are suffering a dearth of newsprint with which to do their dirty work. Last week one Manhattan matron and keeper of 22 cats sent an urgent bulletin to her sister in Massachusetts: Load the station wagon with Boston Globes and come quick.

Six weeks after New York City lost the services of its major dailies, New Yorkers are noticing that the landscape, mores and habits of their city are changing in subtle ways. Without newspapers to occupy their eyes, for instance, subway riders now scrutinize one another, the messages on their T shirts, the brand names of their running shoes, the labels on their luggage. Some newspaper addicts have turned to paperbacks, and others say they are attempting "to think." Husbands and wives are forced into conversation at the breakfast table, though the court system has not yet recorded any resulting alteration in the divorce rate. Office workers are loath to lunch alone, since a solo meal without a newspaper is like a day without sunshine. Says Press Agent Arthur Rubine, who has sought companionship in the Daily Racing Form: "It's no fun to go to the bathroom any more."

Taxi drivers, long the salvation of sourceless journalists, are emerging as informal town criers, transmitters in a complicated nexus of jungle drums that would confuse Margaret Mead. Bernie Stolar, vice president of a small communications firm, first heard that Menachem Begin was in town after the Camp David summit when the taxi Stolar was taking to work encountered a traffic jam near the Waldorf-Astoria and his driver explained that Begin had just arrived. Shrugs Stolar: "It was news to me."

Of course the city's television stations have expanded their trivia-packed local newscasts by adding some news and even more trivia, and the four new typographically wretched strike papers are throbbing with wire-service copy that the regular dailies would have spurned. But for New Yorkers used to the Daily News's outrageously witty headlines, the Times's impeccably orotund dispatches from Ouagadougou and Timbuktu and the Post's wonderfully inaccurate gossip, there is an aching void. "They're like children," says Political Consultant David Garth of the three struck dailies. "You don't know how much you love them until they leave home."

Mayor Edward Koch agrees. "New York will not be New York again till the papers are back," he believes. Meanwhile he can be seen wandering around the neighborhood of his old Greenwich Village apartment, lantern in hand, looking for an honest newspaper. "I pick up the Washington Post," he sighs. "I thumb through it for 15 minutes. And I say to myself, 'Why am I reading this?' "

Sundays are especially trying. That is the day when, before the strike, masochistic New Yorkers took perverse delight in setting aside eight or nine hours for plowing through the 4-lb., 400-page Sunday Times to reassure themselves that nothing had really happened after all. "My Sundays are ruined!" cries Paula Gamache, a senior treasury analyst for Revlon, Inc. "There's no substitute for the crossword puzzle. I do it every week, I'm that compulsive." To fill the empty hours, Pronto, a trendy East Side Italian restaurant, is offering a Sunday brunch for the first time, and similar affairs at other nosheries are S.R.O. Central Park is jumping with even more joggers than usual, and museums report heavy Sunday crowds.

So far, the strike has not greatly afflicted the city's economy. Attendance at Broadway theaters is down slightly from last year, but department-store sales are running 5% to 10% ahead of year-ago levels. The local real estate market is so tight --apartment vacancies are running below 3% of units--that agents do not have much to advertise anyway. Some florists say that funeral business is down about 10% because, though people still die, they are not honored with newspaper obituaries. A few weddings have been postponed because the parents felt they had earned a notice in the Times.

The book-publishing industry, which relies on newspaper reviews to boost sales, has taken to such alternative vehicles as television and radio spots; Simon & Schuster President Richard Snyder can now be heard on radio peddling his wares in much the same way that gravel-voiced Tom Carvel sells the products of his ice cream shops. But authors of forthcoming books are woebegone. Linley Stafford, a publicist whose first book, One Man's Family, will be published by Random House on Oct. 13, has postponed the press party ("How can you have one without a press?" his agent asked). Says Stafford: "If you don't get a New York Times review, you can get lost between the cracks."

The newspapers themselves may face a similar problem because of the strike. Without a product for customers to review daily, the struck papers may fade from their readers' memories, and subsequently their advertisers'. After a 114-day newspaper strike in 1962-63, the city's six surviving dailies lost a total of 400,000 readers. No one knows what the 1978 losses will be. Or indeed when the strike will end; both sides have been summoned to Washington by federal mediators, but the publishers last week refused to attend.

At least one group of citizens is faring well: the customers of prostitutes. Under a law that took effect shortly after the pooper-scooper statute, the names of hookers' patrons are available to the press whenever the vice squad strikes. Frets Captain Eugene Brozio at Manhattan's Midtown North precinct house: "To get any impact on the Johns, you need widespread publicity, and thanks to the strike we're not getting it."

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