The lank 48-year-old, neatly garbed in a pin-stripe suit, is surprisingly low-keyed in our hour-long conversation. Yet the verbal gems still trip as neatly off his tongue as they do when he's putting an irate telephone caller in his place, to the delight of radio listeners. Never hesitant to voice his opinion on any topic, Barry pounces on my questions with an eagerness that belies his calm exterior. New York's reputation outside the city limits, says the widely travelled Farber, has gone way downhill in recent decades. "It used to be, where I grew up, that people would brag about coming to New York four times a year. Today they brag about never coming here. The large companies send their salesmen to Manhattan for a 45-minute conference like an Entebbe raid. ... New York needs not a slow, gradual, ho-hum comeback. It needs a dramatic voice who is going to say that the city's priorities for the last 40 years have been wrong. New York is a sexy woman who's been running around in the mud. Turn the hose on her and she's going to regain her allure." The tax revolt, he believes, "should definitely come to New York. You cannot expect to live as sinfully economically as we've lived, and avoid a rampage. The politicians have brought this upon themselves. And don't let them get away with telling us that they have to cut police, firemen, and sanitation before they cut themselves, because they don't. "When John Lindsay was mayor, he flung back his head and inhaled the vapors of the 1960s. And it was left, baby, left. He bet his presidential hopes on that. But in the last mayoral election, it was the conservatives who did the best. Koch was the most conservative Democrat running." His anticommunist sentiments come to the surface when the subject turns to the 1980 Olympics. "I think we should have never allowed it in Moscow on the grounds that we have never had the Olympics in a dictatorship in the modern era. I'd like to see the athletes of the world say, 'We're not going to Moscow to play sportive games by rules when the Russians live in violation of the rules of civilization itself.' Russia is guilty of the world's worst cast of unsportsmanlike conduct. ... Yes, we should pull out. But the Olympics is small potatoes. I say, start a new United Nations for the free countries of the world -- a UFN, a United Free Nations, which shall be an association of all nations governed by law, of all free democracies that want to remain free. In 1945, we did not seek to build a fraternity of dictatorships where tinhorn tyrants would outvote democracies 10 to one." Barry has lived on the West Side ever since he came to the city from Greensboro, North Carolina 21 years ago, and now occupies a 17-room penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. "The West Side and the East Side are like East Berlin and West Berlin in terms of the rigidity of lifestyle," he says. "There's a feeling on the West Side that we don't have to impress each other. We know where it's at."