Reporters’ Notebook From Manhattan : Exchange Bell Tolls for Missing Visitor

Gorby may have stood them up at the New York Stock Exchange, but Gordon didn’t let them down.

Up until only four minutes before the market closed Wednesday, the podium over the exchange’s main trading floor stood readied, in case Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev chose to stop by and take the NYSE up on its offer to let him ring the bell.

Sure enough, a balding man stepped out into the klieg-lit glare, and cheers went up. But the man was 78-year-old Gordon Brooks, a floor partner with J. C. Bradford & Co., who had long ago been offered the relatively rare honor of ringing the closing bell as a way of celebrating his 50th year as a member of the exchange.

If Brooks’ colleagues were disappointed, their warm applause did not show it as he rang the bell for 15 seconds. Nor did Brooks seem to care that he might have been nudged aside by Gorbachev, had the Soviet leader’s schedule and inclination allowed it.

He confided to reporters afterward that there “was never any doubt in my mind. It was always me.”

And the market closed up, by 4.27 points.

Most of the roughly 4,000 people who live on Governors Island gathered along a fairway of the nine-hole golf course that also serves as the Coast Guard base’s parade ground, hoping to see President Reagan’s big green helicopter land. They whooped and hollered and waved, but no one was quite sure whether the distant figure who waved back was Reagan or somebody else.

Then, under instructions from the Coast Guard brass, they withdrew to their homes for the three-hour duration of Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s stay. They were even warned to stay away from windows, drapes and blinds, lest the Secret Service think an intruder was waiting for someone’s motorcade to pass.

“Poor Mr. Gorbachev is going to think this place is a ghost town,” said one resident.

But the children didn’t mind.

“We got the day off from school,” explained second-grader David Hayes, 7.

The island was spotless, the product of a weeklong cleanup binge that Coast Guard officers insisted was nothing like those of Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the czarist official who erected phony villages for his sovereign to visit.

“We just did our spring cleaning in the fall,” Cmdr. Henry Plimack, a Coast Guard spokesman, said.

Nevertheless, the process did include hundreds of technical trainees picking up leaves on the village green in front of the Admiral’s Quarters where the two presidents met--22,000 bags worth.

The summit stopped traffic at the tip of Manhattan and evicted one capitalist from his place of business, but only temporarily.

Luis Diaz runs a tiny sandwich shop next to the terminal for the ferry that runs to Governors Island. On Wednesday morning, the Coast Guard and New York police told him he would have to close for most of the day.

“No way,” argued Diaz. “You can’t shut my business like that.”

So Diaz, born in the Dominican Republic, cut a quick deal with the Coast Guard: he loaded a van with sandwiches and set up an impromptu canteen for reporters and police officers on Governors Island.

“I’m doing great,” he said, assembling more sandwiches on the van’s rear deck.

Christmas shoppers at Tiffany’s were startled when Barbara Bush, the first lady-to-be, showed up at the famous 5th Avenue jewelers with her entourage of Secret Service agents.

There to have her watch repaired, she quipped that traffic inside the store proved far worse than the traffic she encountered en route, despite predictions that the Gorbachev visit would create massive gridlock throughout the city.

After engaging in small talk and signing an autograph, she left the store with this directive to the crowd that had gathered: “Now you all go shop.”