F.Y.I.

Bus Signs in the Sky

Q. At a number of bus stops in Manhattan I've noticed a short section of pipe protruding about three inches from the sidewalk, its end covered by a bright blue plastic cap. Any idea what these things are for, other than tripping over?

A. In the next several weeks, 2,900 such pipes, all in Manhattan, will be fitted with new poles and bus stop signs, said Robert Leonard, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, which is putting up the new signs in conjunction with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. To make the new signs more visible from a distance, they will be positioned up to 20 feet above the sidewalk, Mr. Leonard said. It is hoped, he said, that the extreme height of the new signs will also put them beyond the reach of all but the most athletic vandals.

The city plans on building 6,000 of the new markers during the next three years, Mr. Leonard said. There are 18,000 bus stops in the city, many of which are left unidentified after their signs are stolen or covered with graffiti. The new signs, made of easy-to-clean recycled plastic instead of aluminum, will look a little different, but provide the same basic information about routes and bus numbers. You'll just have to look a lot higher to see them.

Print Is No Hallucination

Q. My wife and I have a print of a favorite Georgia O'Keeffe painting, ''New York Night'' (1929), which depicts the Manhattan skyline above a long avenue shimmering with tiny headlights. The foreground is dominated by a dark, castlelike tower with a large, rose-shaped window near the top. For many years we have searched New York for this strange building. Does it still exist? Did it ever?

A. It's the Beverly Hotel, at East 50th Street and Lexington Avenue.

In November 1925, Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz moved into an apartment on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel (now the Marriott East Side), on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets. O'Keeffe left the windows uncurtained, and the light-filled living room, which faced north and east, became her studio. ''New York Night'' is a painting of Lexington Avenue as O'Keeffe saw it looking out from her studio in 1929, when the peculiar-looking 26-story Beverly, then only two years old, obscured much of the streetscape. Nonetheless, in a 1976 catalogue of her work, O'Keeffe wrote of the painting that Lexington ''looked, in the night, like a very tall thin bottle with colored things going up and down inside it.''

Between 1925 and 1929, O'Keeffe completed more than 20 paintings, pastels and drawings of various New York skyscrapers and views of the East River from the Shelton. The skyscraper paintings from this period, virtually the only time O'Keeffe focused on New York as a subject, dramatize the soaring verticality of the exuberant, ambitious city of the 1920's in a precise, hard-edged style. Several depict buildings at night, their windows aglow. ''New York Night,'' by the way, is on display in Lincoln, Neb., in the Sheldon Memorial Gallery at the University of Nebraska.

Missing Memorial

Q. A few months ago a sign appeared at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island that says ''10 Acre Site for Development.'' Wasn't this area set aside years ago for a Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial?

A. Yes. Plans to build the memorial have been revived periodically since the architect Louis I. Kahn completed the final design shortly before his death in 1974. The money never materialized, however. Now the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which develops, maintains and operates the island, is ready to consider alternative uses for a plot that includes the memorial site and the Gothic ruins of the Smallpox Hospital and the Strecker Memorial Laboratory just to the north.

Kahn's classically inspired design for the memorial, occupying a 780-foot-long triangular site at the island's southern tip, called for a gently sloped, V-shaped promenade bordered by trees, narrowing to a small area with a bust of Roosevelt. Behind the bust, a templelike three-sided ''roofless room,'' made of 12-foot granite slabs and carved with quotations from Roosevelt, was to open south toward the harbor. Recent estimates put the cost for this memorial at around $15 million, up from $4.4 million when it was proposed.

''The memorial has been talked about for 25 years,'' said Michael T. Greason, a spokesman for the operating corporation. ''And to our knowledge, absolutely nothing has been done. Now we're looking for some feasible proposals.'' DANIEL B. SCHNEIDER