New York’s Genteel Power Alley : Three blocks of Manhattan’s finest addresses are on Central Park South.

On the surface, New York’s Central Park South does not seem like much of a street. It’s only three blocks long and not even built up on one side. There are no famous shops that I can recall, nor museums, nor corporate skyscrapers.

Yet some of the finest addresses in Manhattan are found there, between the marble wall of the Plaza Hotel on the east and Columbus Circle on the west. And all of those addresses have even numbers.

Those three blocks create a handsome cliff of masonry that marks the place where the tall city ends and the woods and trails of Central Park begin. Many of the buildings date to the 1920s and ‘30s, although the venerable Plaza--its towers and mansard roof as imposing as a grand chateau--was completed in 1907.

Cabbies call the street C.P.S. You see that abbreviation on scalloped awnings. It is a street of large flags that snap like heraldic banners. It is a place of uniformed doormen, who proudly guard the line between service and security.

Central Park South has its own pace: bustling, but not frantic; worldly, but not aloof; residential, but not settled.

The wide sidewalk between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue teems with visitors heading to and from hotel rooms or the pied-a-terre apartments they keep in the city.

Some of these travelers carry sports gear and a guest card to the New York Athletic Club, a 1929 Italianate palace at the corner of C.P.S. and Seventh. Others stride beyond for performances at Lincoln Center. Carnegie Hall is just a couple of blocks downtown. Even Broadway brushes by at Columbus Circle.

Horse-drawn carriages line up on Central Park South near Fifth Avenue, waiting in almost any weather to take riders through the park--a romantic but expensive excursion that many tourists find irresistible. Packs of joggers and cyclists rush past the gates on weekend mornings.

Smack in the center of this enticing neighborhood--at 112 Central Park South--is the serene Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which opened in the 1920s as the Hotel Navarro. Its namesake was a Spanish consul general who built a residence on the site in the 1880s.

The hotel today is what I call New York-shaped: 25 stories tall and five windows wide, windows that frame all of Central Park. From an eighth-floor room, on a blustery winter day, I gazed at bare treetops that stretched north toward the horizon. On either side, grand old towers peeked above the gray woods like distant castles: to the west, the curious Dakota apartments built in 1884; to the east, the pitched roof of the Pierre Hotel and, farther uptown, the classic Carlyle.

At dusk, the scene was laced with the red brake lights of a hundred taxis, weaving through the park, disappearing beneath arched stone bridges, flashing past the rear of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After dark, a golden wire sculpture glimmered from the strings of lights that are wrapped around trees at the fabled Tavern on the Green.

Someone told me that all of the principality of Monaco would fit into Central Park. I’m glad no one has tried.

While the Jockey Club at the Ritz-Carlton, with its English country-home airs, and the Oak Room at the Plaza are two of my favorite gathering places, a few other stops on C.P.S. deserve attention.

The first is Rumpelmayer’s, a celebrated ice-cream parlor at 50 Central Park South. Its windows spill over with teddy bears and stuffed pink elephants and boxes of sweets. Birthday parties at Rumpelmayer’s remain a tradition with generations of New Yorkers.

And, just steps away, is Mickey Mantle’s: the hangout of a genuine baseball hero. This eatery is fast, fun, clean and decidedly sporty. The walls are decked with memorabilia from New York teams--the Yankees, the Jets, the Giants, the Knicks, the Rangers.

Waiters and waitresses wear Yankee pin-striped vests with Mickey’s old number, 7, on the back. Twice a week, all-sports radio station WFAN broadcasts a midday talk program from the restaurant.

A video screen is visible from every table. When I dropped by, they were playing “Baseball 1991: A Video Yearbook.” But a waiter promised that the live Knicks-Houston Rockets basketball game would be shown that night.

Mickey Mantle’s menu covers most definitions of “down home” cooking: Philadelphia cheesesteak, half-pound hamburgers with waffle-fried potatoes, blue corn nachos with guacamole and salsa, Southern fried chicken, angel hair pasta, Manhattan clam chowder.

As I was finishing an admittedly hearty lunch, I overheard a man talking in the next booth. “My wife eats nothing but broccoli, broccoli, broccoli,” he muttered, scooping into a mound of fried onions. “Oh, she likes real food . . . but she avoids it. God, I love to come here.”

Central Park South has something for almost everyone.