Getting to Know the Suddenly Important U.N. : A guided tour of the United Nations in New York is still the best introduction. But check also for a table in the Delegates’ Dining Room.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans looked on the United Nations as a house of foolish wind, when New Yorkers picketed the ambassadors to pack up their fancy suits and splendid robes and go home, when one abrasive American diplomat boasted that his heart would brim with joy if the whole U.N. complex slipped out to sea and sank.

That mood has changed in an incredible way in the last two or three years. Pick up a newspaper nowadays and you are sure to find the U.N. as key actor in three, four, even five top news stories: Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Cambodia, El Salvador, Haiti and on and on. And when Germany recently offered to house the U.N. Children’s Fund in Bonn, New Yorkers cried foul and successfully begged the agency to stay in New York.

Now, more than ever, the United Nations is a political body worth contemplating and attempting to fathom. The best way to start is a visit to its imposing headquarters by the East River on Manhattan in New York City.

But there is a problem. The U.N. does much of its work in private. A visitor cannot just wander into its chambers and corridors. Most are off-limits to unescorted visitors. An official tour, led by one of the 50 guides who come from 25 different countries, opens some of this. But even then, a large part of the U.N. will not be seen by a visitor.

Until the late 1980s, visitors could watch the Security Council in action. The Security Council is the U.N.’s most powerful body--a group of 15 ambassadors who have the authority under the U.N. Charter to insure international peace and security by taking such actions as declaring war on Iraq or imposing sanctions on Serbia.

The Security Council was once an exciting spectacle for visitors: Soviet delegates would walk out in a huff and an American statesman such as the late Adlai Stevenson would parry his opponents with sharp wit. This drama held sway even though, in reality, the Security Council was often paralyzed in those days by the vetoes of those antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Ironically, now that the Cold War is over and the Security Council has broken out of paralysis into power, it does almost all of its work behind closed doors. But even the soporific open sessions are difficult to attend. When there is an open meeting and there are enough security guards on duty to handle visitors, the U.N. sets aside 25 or so Security Council tickets at the visitor’s information desk in the General Assembly building on 46th Street. Unfortunately, there is usually not much advance notice. The ambassadors, once they have reached agreement in their closed session, will usually emerge and announce to news correspondents that an open session has been “convoked” for a short while from then.

Visitors can try the same information desk for tickets to the 181-member General Assembly, which meets regularly from fall through mid-December, and to lesser U.N. bodies--but in this writer’s opinion, a tour that runs a little less than an hour still offers the most reliable and convenient way of taking in the U.N.

The U.N. complex covers 18 acres between First Avenue and the East River, from 42nd to 48th streets. The area was originally a warren of factories, barge landings and run-down slaughterhouses. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought the land as a gift for the U.N. Clearing and construction began in the late 1940s, and the General Assembly Hall opened in 1952. The complex now comprises a 39-story Secretariat Building, the General Assembly Hall, a Conference Building for the Security Council, the Dag Hammarskjold Library and extensive gardens.

To take the tour, enter the General Assembly building through the 46th Street visitors gate. Once inside, signs direct you past a circular visitors information booth and down a long corridor that usually displays a photographic exhibit of U.N. activities around the world. Tickets are sold at the end of the corridor.

English-language tours leave every 20 minutes during the summer, every half-hour during the winter. Each guide speaks English and at least one other language. Foreign language tours are scheduled according to demand. In the busiest times during the summer, the guides average three tours in Spanish and French and two tours in German, Japanese and Chinese every day. Requests for Italian, Arabic, Hebrew and Swedish tours come up from time to time as well.

Be advised, these are not Disneyland tours, and children under 5 are not allowed on them. The guides attempt to turn them into a kind of educational course on the work of the U.N. The guides attend morning briefings so that they can explain the current activities of the Security Council and the General Assembly. Tours become livelier if you throw a few questions culled from the morning newspaper at the guide. On one recent tour, for example, Monica Razuk of Brazil, wearing a neckerchief and jacket with the U.N. logo, explained that the Security Council had taken up the issue of the Western Sahara the day before.

“There is a problem about who will vote in the referendum there,” she said with her slight accent. “That is why the Security Council met yesterday.”

“Is Western Sahara a colony of France?” a tourist asked.

No, Ruzak explained, it is claimed both by Morocco and a rebel group known as the Polisario. “It is disputed territory,” she said.

Guides say that the most popular questions are: Why do the five permanent members of the Security Council have veto power? Will it ever change? Who pays the most to the U.N.? Does the President of the United States ever come here?

The guides lead visitors mainly across the third floor that connects the General Assembly, conference building and Secretariat (the U.N. administrative building). You are far more likely to bump into a journalist on this floor than anyone else. But a sharp-eyed tourist can sometimes catch a glimpse of a well-known diplomat such as American Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright or Russian Ambassador Yuriy Vorontsov outside the Security Council chambers as the tour passes the second floor on the escalator.

While the tours differ somewhat according to the mood and geniality of the guides, the highlights of all are the Security Council chamber, the General Assembly Hall and the various art works donated to the U.N. by governments.

A horseshoe-shaped central table with 21 blue seats dominates the Security Council. The seats serve Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the 15 members of the council and special guests. During the Persian Gulf crisis, the Iraqi and Kuwaiti ambassadors, as the main parties to the dispute, were invited to sit at the ends of the table, from which they often traded bitter insults.

The Security Council is made up of five permanent members with veto power--World War II victors Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States--and 10 members without veto power elected for two-year terms. In 1992, the Security Council met in private almost every day and in public 126 times, adopting 74 resolutions at the open sessions.

Acoustics are so bad in the Security Council chamber that all the ambassadors wear earphones even when they understand the language spoken. Interpreters supply simultaneous translations into English, French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.

There is construction going on at the General Assembly these days. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the U.N. had 159 members, all entitled to a seat in the General Assembly. Now there are 181 members. So workmen are creating several new rows of main floor seats to take care of the new delegates.

The assembly hall, with its 75-foot-high ceiling, curving, wooden walls, two murals by the French painter Fernand Leger and electronic vote tally boards, looks both more elegant and efficient than the Security Council. But the General Assembly, which does most of its work in public, has little power. It meets almost every day except weekends from mid-September to mid-December, with occasional sessions at other times. The U.N. is at its most frenzied in September when heads of state from many countries come to New York to address the opening sessions of the General Assembly.

The delegates sit in alphabetical order of their countries, with lots drawn each year to see which country gets the first spot. For the 1992-1993 session year, Poland sits in first place while the Philippines are last.

The tour also takes visitors past some of the magnificent works of art that embellish the walls of the U.N., all gifts of various governments. And most cannot be seen without taking a tour. They include a mosaic of a Norman Rockwell painting, “The Golden Rule,” made from 25,000 pieces of ceramic tile; the mural “Man’s Struggle for Peace,” by Dominican artist Joseph Vela Zanetti; a sumptuous Belgian tapestry, and an enormous bolt of Ghanaian kente cloth. Even without the tour, a visitor may take in several impressive works of art on view to the public, like the Marc Chagall stained-glass window, created in memory of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, that adjoins the chapel near the visitor’s entrance to the General Assembly. The gardens, open to the public, display numerous sculptures, including a colossal statue of St. George slaying a dragon-like bomber. Even if huge sculptures do not attract you, the gardens north of the General Assembly, with their Japanese cherry trees, are worth a stroll on any pleasant day.

There is a public concourse on the basement floor of the General Assembly where a visitor can buy souvenirs and worldwide folk crafts at a gift shop, U.N. stamps (good only on letters and postcards mailed at the U.N.) at a post office, official publications and postcards at a bookshop, and greeting cards from a UNICEF counter. Since the U.N. is international territory, no New York sales taxes are charged. The concourse also has a small, nondescript and rather boring coffee shop.

It would be a waste and loss of an experience, however, to lunch at the coffee shop. Although the fact is not very well known, the Delegates’ Dining Room on the fourth floor of the General Assembly accepts members of the public for lunch when some of its tables are free. If a table is free, the information desk will issue a pass that allows the visitor to take an elevator up to the dining room.

Waiters at the Delegates’ Dining Room offer guests enormous menus, but it makes no sense to even look at them. The dining room has a dazzling gourmet buffet every day--all you can eat for $18.75 (plus tip but no sales tax).

One recent afternoon, the buffet, featuring French Provencal dishes, offered salmon en croute with dill sauce; larks in tomato sauce; grilled tuna in bourride sauce; beef tongue with capers and onions; beignets; fettuccine with garlic, bacon and pine nuts; chicken fricassee; plum tomatoes with egg and black olives; seafood terrine; egg and vegetable terrine; ratatouille; seafood salad; eggplant caviar on toast; rice; zucchini julienne; vegetable soup; goat cheese; Brie, and Gruyere. For dessert, the table showed a myriad of cakes and pies and fruits and ice creams, included in the price of the buffet.

While sampling these wondrous dishes, all accompanied by an endless variety of breads, a visitor can engage in some delegate watching. Lord Owen, the former British foreign secretary who is trying to work out a peace settlement for Bosnia, dominated one table on the day that Norman, the maitre d’, was offering the buffet from Provence.

Although the fare at the buffet changes every day, diplomats get tired of the Delegates’ Dining Room and head off many days to some more expensive restaurants that have taken up residence in the neighborhood ever since the U.N. moved in. One of the most popular is Le Perigord, a French restaurant on 52nd Street. You are sure to find an ambassador or two at one of the adjoining tables.

But there are inexpensive, popular restaurants in the neighborhood as well, especially two Indian restaurants, Madras Woodlands and Nawab, on 49th Street, each with buffets about half the price of that at the Delegates’ Dining Room. Few ambassadors can be spotted here; these two restaurants draw journalists, mid-level diplo mats and U.N. bureaucrats.

Except for the U.N., this sliver of East Side Manhattan does not have much to offer tourists, but a robust walk will take visitors to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, the Chrysler Building on Lexington Avenue, the New York Daily News Building and Grand Central Station on 42nd Street. But a stay at the U.N. for a tour, a walk in the gardens, a shopping spree in the basement, lunch at the Delegates’ Dining Room and, with luck, a visit to the General Assembly in action, ought to take up a good part of a tourist’s day.

GUIDEBOOK / The U.N. and You

Getting there: Subway riders get off at the 42nd Street Grand Central Station. Buses going uptown on First Avenue stop at the U.N. Bus riders going downtown on Second Avenue can get off at 46th Street and walk one block east.

Tours: Tours are seven days a week, 9 a.m.-4:45 p.m; admission, $6.50 adults, $4.50 seniors over 60 and students, $3.50 children 5-14. Children under 5 are not allowed on tours. For information about foreign-language tours, call (212) 963-7539.

Open meetings: Tickets for open meetings may be picked up, first-come, first-served, at the information desk in the lobby of the General Assembly near the 46th Street entrance. To find out what meetings are scheduled, call (212) 963-7113.

Where to eat:

The U.N. coffee shop on the public concourse is open 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., serving standard fare such as hamburgers and a few hot entrees, cafeteria-style.

Delegates’ Dining Room, open for lunch Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. For reservations, call Norman, the maitre d’, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at (212) 963-7625. The fare is sumptuous and the company bracing; the buffet is $18.75 plus drinks and tip (but no sales tax).

For more information: There is a U.N. information office near the shops on the public concourse in the basement of the General Assembly building. To get U.N. information by phone, call (212) 963-4475.