The stakes were particularly high for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which will get half the money. It has committed to completing the first segment of the Second Avenue subway, from East 96th to East 63rd Streets, jump-starting a project that was abandoned during the city's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970's.

The authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, had warned that the bond measure would "make or break" the Second Avenue subway and the project to link the Long Island Rail Road and Grand Central. Each of the two projects will receive $450 million under the bond measure.

The measure, Proposition 2, was winning by 55 percent to 45 percent, with 97 percent of the state's 16,274 polling precincts reporting, according to unofficial returns reported by The Associated Press.

"The voters want the best transit system in the world, and they are willing to do whatever needs to be done to make it happen," Mr. Kalikow said last night. "Now it's up to us complete the job."

The other half of the $2.9 billion will go to the State Department of Transportation, whose acting commissioner, Thomas J. Madison Jr., campaigned across the state. In New York City, major arteries to be repaired or upgraded under the bond act include the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan and the West Shore Expressway in Staten Island.

The state's last transportation bond act, a $3.9 billion measure, was narrowly defeated, 52 percent to 48 percent, in 2000. That measure was approved in New York City, 73 percent to 27 percent, but was resoundingly rejected upstate, 60 percent to 40 percent.

Proponents of this year's bond act hoped that a strong turnout for the New York City mayoral race would overcome opposition elsewhere, although several upstate communities also had mayoral elections yesterday, including Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and Albany.

This year's measure was endorsed by Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his Democratic opponent, Fernando Ferrer. The state and city comptrollers, the leaders of both chambers of the Legislature, and dozens of lawmakers also supported it.

Vote Yes for Transportation, a coalition of business, labor, environmental and transportation groups, raised more than $1.8 million for advertisements, flyers and mailings.

"We had, for a shoestring budget, an incredibly robust field operation," the campaign's top field organizer, Edward Draves, said by telephone last night from Buffalo. "We distributed literature, manned polling sites and were on the palm cards of both Ferrer and Bloomberg."

Mr. Kalikow said he was given a campaign card endorsing the bond act on his way to vote at Public School 6 on the East Side, the same polling precinct where Mayor Bloomberg voted.

There was little organized opposition. Groups that opposed the bond act - including the Automobile Club of New York, the Conservative Party of New York State and the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog - relied on press releases and messages to their members.

In addition to the bond act, and a state constitutional amendment that would shift budget-making powers from the governor to the Legislature, two other questions were on the New York City ballot.

Neither question attracted significant opposition, and both were approved by 3-to-1 margins.

Question 3 will change the City Charter to establish a code of professional conduct for administrative law judges and hearing officers.

Question 4 will extend fiscal mandates that were enacted during the 1975 fiscal crisis. It will require a balanced budget and a four-year financial plan to be prepared each year, and impose conditions relating to short-term debt limits and auditing standards.

Courtesy of Patricia Maurice

Edward Beauclerk Maurice, 1935.

"The Last Gentleman Adventurer" is the enthralling account of Mr. Maurice's stay among the Inuit of the Far North, and his evolution from the callow, accident-prone youth the local Inuit called "the Boy" into the skilled hunter, amateur doctor and trader they renamed Issumatak, "One Who Thinks."

Mr. Maurice waited more than half a century to tell his tale. After serving in the New Zealand Navy during World War II, he settled into the quiet life of a bookseller in a small English village and died in 2003, as his only book was being readied for publication in Britain. Time and distance lend the narrative a peculiar charm. It is an old man's backward look at the young man he once was, and at a world that has all but vanished, and is all the more precious for that.

The Boy started off badly. Almost immediately after landing on Baffin Island, he managed to strand himself on a cliff face, and thereafter he showed an uncanny knack for falling into ice holes. Fortunately, his expectations were low and powers of endurance impressive. The local diet of seal stew, lumps of seal or deer fat, and meatballs made of mashed beans, corned beef and deer meat did not seem all that bad compared with English boarding-school fare. Deer fat, he found, "had a most palatable, nutty flavor."

Mr. Maurice flinched only once, after being served chunks of seal meat from a pot in the tent of a hunter and realizing, soon after, that the cooking vessel also served as a chamber pot for the baby of the family. "I lay awake considering the implications of this discovery for a long time," he writes, "but finally fell asleep, taking cold comfort from the thought that it is only possible to die once."

The sense of isolation was profound. There were 15 Europeans, and only one doctor, on a territory many times the size of England. Once a year, a ship from the Canadian mainland dropped off supplies, and unreliable radio signals transmitted fitful news of the outside world. Searching for reading material at his first post, Mr. Maurice faced a stark set of choices. The offerings ranged from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" to a thriller titled "Blood Ran Down the Bishop's Face."

Rather than brooding, Mr. Maurice threw himself into his new life. Sensitive and curious, he observed the local people, worked hard to understand their customs and gained fluency in the Inuit language. He fell in love with his natural surroundings and became an enthusiastic hunter. In one rousing episode, he even strikes out on the open sea in pursuit of a whale.

The overall approach is antiheroic. Hunting is treated less as an adventure than as an occupation (although there's no mistaking the exhilaration of skimming over the snow in a dogsled and bagging three or four caribou). Rarely does Mr. Maurice even mention the cold. Most of his attention is directed toward the Inuit and their culture, to the life inside their tents and igloos, and to the network of social relations that sustains them.

Command of the language and a gossipy fascination with local disputes take him a long way. Mr. Maurice quickly discovers that the patronizing Europeans are, unknown to them, patronized in turn, satirized in song and story. "She opens her mouth like/ A fish out of water/ To show off her tooth/ Like a walrus tusk...," runs one ditty describing a female visitor from the Canadian south. On long winter nights, he listens to native storytellers, and when invited to speak, holds his audience spellbound with "Snow White" and "Aladdin and the Lamp." The author paints these scenes with a quiet, understated charm.

There is high drama, too. In his final posting, on Frobisher Bay, Mr. Maurice confronts a mysterious epidemic that kills many of the people's best hunters. With only a small medicine kit, he assumes the role of doctor and finds himself locked in a political battle with the wily local shaman, who sees One Who Thinks and his strange aspirins as a threat.

Mr. Maurice must also deal with an emotional crisis as Innuk, the widow of a hunter, encourages him to make their friendship something deeper and more permanent. Temperatures run high when he forms a sled team with Innuk and her good friend, an Inuit version of Annie Oakley. Together, they speed across the snow on expedition after expedition, one of the most improbable hunting partnerships ever seen in the Arctic.

Mr. Maurice draws the curtain discreetly on his relationship with Innuk. But his feelings for her, for the Inuit and for the harsh, unforgiving land they call home radiate a steady warmth more than 50 years later. His memories remained clear and powerful. It would be interesting to know whether the reverse is true, and whether anyone on Baffin Island tells a tale or two about a stranger known as One Who Thinks.

Eclectic museum plans serious fun as it turns 10

Today's pointy-head quiz: What binds together the Miami Beach Veterans Day Parade and the New World Symphony, Morris Lapidus and the Biltmore Hotel, Thomas Edison and mambo king Cachao?

Painfully unobvious answer: The Wolfsonian-FIU, dummkopf, the museum that knows how to have serious fun.

Find out how it all jells this weekend, when the Wolfsonian -- recently called ''one of America's most remarkable museums'' by The New York Times -- marks its 10th anniversary with a three-day celebration as eclectic as its category-busting collection.

There will be events exclusive and inclusive, from the formal gala at the Biltmore -- Peter Duchin! Cachao! Fireworks! -- to a family fun day on Sunday and the Veterans Day parade, which will end at the museum's Art Deco District home on Friday with the premiere of the Wolfsonian Fanfare, its new musical theme, performed by members of the New World Symphony.

The museum will also unveil its new café and shop, featuring at its portal a rare and arresting Edison Bipolar Dynamo, polished and mounted on a pedestal like a gleaming industrial sculpture. Beyond it is a banned-books section, a 60-inch plasma screen for film showings, and a new line of uniquely Wolfsonian merchandise designed by cheeky Miami ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, all of it displayed on a 19th-century modular book-stacking shelf system, the first ever created.

As in everything the Wolfsonian administrators mount, there is a sober purpose to these goings-on: not only to raise money, but to highlight the museum's singular mission -- illuminating the political and social history of the 60 years before the end of World War II, a period that gave birth to our modern world, through objects of art and everyday use, furniture, architectural fragments, books, examples of commercial and political propaganda, and ephemera such as postcards and travel brochures. And more.

''We try to combine interesting history or historical references in keeping with the whole motivation of the Wolfsonian, and not have just another party,'' said museum founder and eminence grise Mitchell ''Micky'' Wolfson Jr.

LIVELY REPUTATION

Erudition aside, the Wolfsonian's parties and public events have gained renown as some of the wittiest and liveliest in Miami.

Wolfson, heir to the Wometco movie-theater fortune, amassed the 100,000 objects that form the basis for the collection during world travels. To house them, he acquired,renovated and expanded the 1927 Washington Storage Building, then donated everything to Florida International University.

The museum opened to the public on Veterans Day, 1995, to acclaim from critics and connoisseurs. But the hard-to-describe collection has made it hard for the museum to catch on with the broader public, even though the objects it displays are not generally fine or high art, but once-commonplace stuff that Wolfsonian directors believe should be interesting and accessible even to people who do not frequent museums.

''We're trying to make it part of the town civic fabric, and that you don't do overnight,'' said Wolfson, the museum's chairman. ``But people aren't sure what to make of it. We present narratives to the public, but they're always changing. It's always a surprise. It's stimulating and provocative, but difficult to pin down.''

MUSEUM OF THINKISM

Thus, a new slogan -- The Museum of Thinkism -- to pique interest, and the Dynamo Café, to drive traffic and, so administrators hope, turn their block into a hot spot on Washington Avenue, which has been up and down and is again looking for a way up. The café is housed in an annex to the main building that formerly presented a blank facade to the street.

''Things are starting to happen on Washington Avenue, and we're hoping the café makes a real contribution to what can be done in terms of renovations on the block,'' Wolfsonian director Cathy Leff said.

Ultimately, though, it's the main business of the Wolfsonian -- exhibits -- that will draw the crowds, Leff said.

THE AMERICAN HOTEL

And for the Very Wolfsonian Weekend, as the anniversary celebration has been dubbed, the museum will launch a show and two publications firmly anchored in hometown history: the development and elaboration of the American hotel, which gave rise to and shaped modern Miami and Miami Beach.

For the first time, the Wolfsonian will put on view selections from the archives of Schultze & Weaver, the architecture firm famously responsible for South Florida landmarks such as the Freedom Tower, the Coral Gables Biltmore and the Breakers in Palm Beach, as well as the Pierre and the Waldorf-Astoria hotels, Jazz Age stalwarts in New York City, and the Sevilla Biltmore in Havana.

The Breakers lent furniture for the show, and the Waldorf disassembled a gate and shipped it to the Wolfsonian. Museum doormen will wear uniforms lent by the Waldorf during opening weekend.

The archive, acquired by Wolfson from the architects' heirs, is also the basis for a new book from Princeton Architectural Press, Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age. An accompanying issue of the Wolfsonian's Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts traces the history of American hotels from the Gilded Age to Morris Lapidus' modern rococo Miami Beach concoctions, the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau.

Fittingly, the exhibition also gave the Wolfsonian the perfect theme for its anniversary celebration. Hence the Biltmore gala with the Duchin orchestra playing music of the Jazz Age, and Cachao, aka Israel Lopez, playing the mambo of Havana's golden '50s. Not incidentally, the exhibit and its offshoots also embrace the long-standing connections between New York and Miami and Miami Beach, where both Lapidus and Schultze & Weaver did their best-known work, Leff noted.

''Because there are people here who might not have been fully exposed to what we have to offer, we wanted to do an exhibition that connects to the culture of this community, and hotels and tourism is certainly a big theme here,'' Leff said.

``The whole idea is to celebrate this community.''

The frivolity, she noted, will be balanced with the solemnity of the Veterans Day event. The Armistice Day that gave rise to the veterans holiday marked the end of World War I, a cataclysm amply documented in the Wolfsonian's collection.

So on Armistice Day, the philharmonic will play, not the shuffling brown tunes of Paul Simon's song but composer Michael Ruszcynski's new Fanfare, at once honoring the Wolfsonian and American vets.

''We validate and perpetuate a history, and we connect it to now,'' Leff said, finally and aptly summing up the Wolfsonian.