The trick for mayoral hopeful Fernando Ferrer in this election will be to convince New Yorkers that when he talks about “two New Yorks,” he is making a compelling point about class, not an explosive argument about race. He resurrected the phrase, which may have cost him the 2001 election, in a speech at the Bronx yesterday.

“I’ve spoken in the past about two New Yorks,” Mr. Ferrer told an audience at a belated celebration of Martin Luther King Day at Lehman College at the Bronx yesterday. “Let me be clear: I am still committed to solving this problem. We don’t want a city that’s an island of the vastly rich surrounded by a struggling mass of working poor desperately trying to get into the economic and social mainstream.”

Mr. Ferrer’s return to the theme of “two New Yorks” recalls the 2001 election, when he lost the Democratic runoff to the then public advocate, Mark Green of Manhattan, by 18,000 votes. Analysts said at the time that Mr. Green won because rivals like a former speaker of the City Council, Peter Vallone, portrayed Mr. Ferrer’s catchphrase of the “two New Yorks” as “racially divisive” and linked him to the Reverend Al Sharpton. After the bitter runoff campaign, Mr. Ferrer was late and tepid in his support for Mr. Green, and Democratic turnout on Election Day was disappointing in Mr. Ferrer’s home borough, the Bronx.

Yesterday, the former borough president, who polls say is leading the field in the race for the 2005 Democratic nomination, was careful to say he was making an economic argument, not a racial one, when he talked about the divisions in the city.

“Our greatest challenge in America and in New York today,” Mr. Ferrer said, “is closing the ever-growing gap between those doing very well and the rest who are struggling to make ends meet.

“We read each day about the massive budget deficits that our city faces, and our leaders have a responsibility to address that imbalance,” he said. “But they have another responsibility that is just as great, and that is to close the dignity deficit.”

“Success in New York is not a zero-sum game,” he said later in the speech prepared for delivery at Lehman. “I celebrate the success of some New Yorkers who are doing very well. Wall Street has come roaring back, and the portfolios of CEOs and blue-chip investors are growing larger. And that’s great for our city. We also need to make sure that with this growth comes the creation of new jobs and opportunities.”

Nowhere is the debate better exemplified, Mr. Ferrer said, than by the development plans on the far West Side of Manhattan. The Bloomberg administration has championed the mammoth project, which would, among other things, develop office space, apartments, affordable housing, and a domed stadium for the Jets football team along the Hudson River.

Critics have derided the stadium plan as a pact between billionaires – Mr. Bloomberg and the owner of the New York Jets, Robert Wood Johnson III – who have made a sweetheart deal in which ordinary New Yorkers have had no say. The stadium, officially called the New York Sports and Convention Center, would be built over rail yards owned by the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the way the financing has been set up, Mr. Bloomberg has not had to go to voters, or even to the City Council, to get permission to proceed.

Foes of the stadium, and Mr. Ferrer is among them, also grouse that Mr. Bloomberg is willing to spend $300 million in city money – the state would supply the same amount – to build a platform and a retractable roof for the stadium at a time when the city money would be better spent on schools and on salaries for teachers, firefighters, and police.

Mr. Ferrer said the focus on the far West Side only proved his point about the economic gulf in New York City during the Bloomberg administration.

“I think that’s the wrong priority,” Mr. Ferrer said.

“How can we spend $600 million on a pro football stadium when we’ve cut $28 million in finding for after-school programs?” he continued. “After school programs should be a priority.”

He went on to cite the alternative priorities of building more classrooms to relieve overcrowding in the schools, providing better access to child care, helping develop more good jobs, and creating additional affordable housing.

Mr. Bloomberg, for his part, sees the development of the West Side as the linchpin of a plan to help all New Yorkers. He has sold the project as a job creator, a boon to the city’s economy, and a vital element of the city’s bid to be named host of the 2012 Olympics. When asked about whether he felt there were “two New Yorks,” Mr. Bloomberg said he was keenly aware of “the people who haven’t been dealt a good hand.

“Our great challenge is to make sure that this is a city of opportunity for everybody,” he told an audience yesterday morning at the opening of the new Whitehall Ferry Terminal, resurrecting a theme from his State of the City address. “We should always find the resources to make sure nobody sleeps in the street and that everybody gets health care and nobody goes hungry and that all our children get a good education. At the same time, I want to make sure that property values go up and that jobs come here and people have great cultural institutions to go to.”

A recent Quinnipiac University poll put Mr. Ferrer neck-and-neck with Mr. Bloomberg in a head-to-head race for mayor. Mr. Ferrer will have to defeat a handful of Democratic candidates first, including City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner. Another candidate, Council Member Charles Barron, is expected to drop out of the race.

“I am not surprised that Ferrer has resurrected this theme in terms of the political strategy,” a Baruch College professor of political science, Douglas Muzzio, said. “I think he had to go back to it because it is something he really believes in. He can’t walk away from 2001, and there is a reality to the message. This is a class-geography argument rather than a discussion about the race. Ferrer is saying that City Hall is too Manhattan-centric, and that’s a good argument.”

In what may be a sign of other campaigns’ determination to tread carefully around the phrase “two New Yorks,” neither Mr. Bloomberg nor the Miller campaign was willing to address Mr. Ferrer’s speech directly or to characterize what he said.

“I am not a wordsmith,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday when asked about whether the “two New Yorks” theme was a constructive one. “I am just trying to work for everybody.”