Ghost Town

_ WORLDLY LOSS: As of yesterday, New York city officials said 5,219 people were missing in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, while 344 were confirmed dead and 289 dead were identified. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at the United Nations yesterday that the trade center was targeted because of the diversity of the city's population and the openness of American society. Citizens of 80 countries are among the presumed victims. Among them, 250 Brits, 200 Indians and 100 Germans.

Mark Akins and a team of a dozen workers are still making their way through the ghost town that is Garden State Park, marking, tagging and sorting everything that doesn't breathe, including the kitchen sink. Akins has been at it since March, weeks before the last horse crossed the finish line on May 3 and the last day of simulcast betting on May 29. And he and his workers probably will be at it until the last minute before Garden State, starting Friday, becomes the site of one of the biggest liquidation sales ever in the Philadelphia area.

The way Council President Gerald McTamney sees things, "some people bring joy when they arrive and joy when they go. " After 32 years, McTamney, who will retire from the council when his term ends in December, figures he falls somewhere in between. "I came on strong a lot of times and I don't bend easy, but I never deliberately tried to hurt anyone," he said. When he took office, despite naysayers who said a Democrat would never win his Republican-held ward, "I guess I was like every new official," McTamney said.

They came. They saw. They conquered. They left. There you have it, the story of ghost towns. The United States is sprinkled with them, especially out West. Many are dead cities but, in the strangest way, they now operate with entirely new lives; they have morphed into travel destinations. This is even odder when you consider that Rome or Paris or Tokyo may be far, but easy to reach, yet a few of America's ghost towns are nearly inaccessible. And many of the rest pose a great challenge.

Shortly after Tiger Woods made golfing history yesterday as the youngest player to win a career grand slam with victories in the Masters, U.S. Open, PGA and British Open, the balls started flying at the Long Knockers Golf Club at the Strawberry Mansion Driving Range. So did the pride. Proud to be American. Proud to be black. Proud to be Asian. Proud to be young. Proud to be just a part of the game of golf. "I watched it all. I just think it's incredible how he's head and shoulders over the rest of the field," said Vernon Sweet, 35, a restaurant manager, who said he was only moderately interested in golf before Woods came along.

This once-sleepy border post best known as the home village of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin became a thriving town thanks to the millions of dollars in relief aid that flows through it. "When I came here in 1993, this was a ghost town," said David Taban, the area representative for Norwegian People's Aid, one of the humanitarian organizations that use Koboko as a staging area for relief work in nearby southern Sudan. Now, Koboko's dusty streets are lined with offices of relief organizations, transport companies, bars, restaurants, and retail shops.

When it came time to get on the Internet, Halfway, Ore., was not about to go halfway. Halfway, population 306, has agreed to change its name to Half.com, at the request of a Conshohocken Internet start-up. "Oh, yeah. We're going all the way," Mayor Dick Crow said. Halfway's seven-member City Council on Thursday night voted unanimously to rename the town Half.com. The marketing ploy was dreamed up by executives of Half.com, which plans to launch a consumer Internet site in mid-January.

It is the middle of a workday, and Cliff Maurer has left his office to walk in the middle of the road. Leisurely, he crosses the train tracks, sidesteps a stone-laden quarry truck and lingers on the street outside the village novelty store, chatting with another business owner, who, suddenly, also has time to talk. "Normally we can't walk across here like this," said Maurer, owner of Torodyne, an automotive supplier. "We'd get killed. " Cars used to pass through this rural village of six houses and seven businesses, nestled in the northwest corner of Wrightstown Township.

In Atlantic City, the air is fragrant with the smell of pine and sagebrush, and there isn't a high roller or a high-rise in sight - the nearest thing to Trump Tower is an adobe-brick bar and restaurant called the Atlantic City Mercantile. This is Atlantic City, Wyo., a ramshackle collection of cabins and clapboard buildings on a hillside 7,650 feet above sea level. More people are buried in its cemetery than live there year-round. Atlantic City - named for its location on the Atlantic side of the Continental Divide - has seen good days and bad since it sprung up in the 1860s after gold was discovered in Rock Creek, a stream that runs through it. By the 1870s, it boasted several thousand residents, almost all of them single men, and a rip-roaring nightlife of bars, brothels and gambling houses.

The door to the Shirt Shop on the Cape May beachfront stood wide open to the wind. Just across Beach Drive, thunderous waves pounded onto the sand. Cars shook as the wind lifted white foam more than a yard into the air ahead of the breaking waves. "We've had a lot of customers today," said Jackie Endicott in the Shirt Shop. "We were supposed to have a sidewalk sale and there were actually people here asking why we weren't having it. "I said, 'There's a hurricane across the street, could that have anything to do with it?