Daily News from New York, New York • 7

7 ob-sla informant to oet 60G Hartford (UPI) A woman who bought an automatic rifle used in the 1979 robbery-murder of three Purola-tor Security guards and who tipped off police after the bloody holdup will receive a $60,000 reward. Patricia Dolphin, 27, of New Haven, had turned informant and helped police in the $1.8 million robbery in 1979 at a Purolator garage in Waterbury. The reward was approved in a ruling disclosed Friday by Superior Court Judge Frank J. Kinney who had rejected a Waterbury man's claim to the reward money. A defense attorney in the case, Michael J.

Graham, said the decision to pay a state reward to Dolphin was "outrageous." He said Dolphin should have been charged as an accessory. Dolphin testified against Lawrence J. Pelletier 38, and Donald Couture, 29, who were convicted of the murder of the three guards and are each serving 75-year sentences. SHE TESTIFIED that she had gone to a Meriden, gun store and bought an automatic rifle for Pelletier that police said was used to cut down the three guards. Haven, who married Pellitier in prison last November, has pleaded guility and is awaiting sentencing on three counts of murder.

Donna Couture Sousa, 27, of Wal-lingford, Couture's former wife, has been indicted on murder charges and is awaiting trial. Waterbury state's attorney, Francis M. McDonald, told Kinney that Dolphin's information made it possible to crack the case. "We know of no other person who should receive the reward," he said. The reward, the largest in state history, represents the $20,000 maximum authorized by the state for each of the three deaths.

Dolphin, whb also put in a claim for the $50,000 offered by the Purolator Co. after the April 16. 1979, holdup, testified that she called police after she heard radio reports of the robbery and identified Pelletier and Couture. She was never charged in the crime. But two other women face multiple murder counts.

Evelyn Vega Pelletier, 29, of New mM Sy. By ALTON SLAGLE 'Re-education of the public in the use of the park is a major thing. Judith Heintz, restoration planner i' .5:4 Frederick Law 0 Imsted his Central Park 1. 110th St. boathouse.

2. Winter Drive. 3. Great Lawn. 4.

Belvedere Castle. 5. Bethesda Fountain. 6. Sheep Meadow.

7. Dairy. 8. Wollman Rink. 9.

Maine Monument. needs overhaul from too much wear and tear. When he won the job in 1857 after a design competition, Frederick Law Olmsted also inherited a preliminary plan for what was seen as a major showcase park in midtown Manhattan. That he didn't follow it was to earn him the gratitude of generations of New Yorkers. The land he was hired to clear was less than ideal a marshy, rubble-strewn plot inhabited by squatters.

But over the next 15 years, the genius of Frederick Olmsted transformed that land into one of the world's premier parks, an 842-acre oasis of forest and meadow that for more than a century has delighted millions in a rapidly expanding New York. Central Park was an instant and unqualified success. But time and people take their toll. Now the job is to rebuild, and in Central Park, that mammoth task has begun. From the boathouse at 110th St.

to the Maine Monument near Columbus Circle, Central Park is being spruced up. Long neglected, the park is being resodded, replanted and restored. THE CONSTRUCTION of Central Park was one of the great public works projects of all time, for its hills, valleys, lakes and great sloping lawns are all manmade. The park evolved carefully, painstakingly, under Olmsted's direction, literally carved and sculpted and blasted and moved and planted under the master's guiding hand. He became the park's first superintendent and went on to work his magic on Prospect and Morningside parks, the National Capitol grounds in Washington, and campuses, estate grounds and parks the nation over.

Aiding him in the huge Manhattan project was his partner, Calvert Vaux, a talented young architect recruited from England. That the two created from the devastation between what is now 59th and 110th Sts. and Fifth Ave. and Central Park West one of the great parks of the world is not open to question. Nor that the fruit of their genius has suffered over the years, to the point that in the 1970s, Central Park was on the verge of being lost its lawns trampled to brown, hard-packed desolation its hills eroded, its lakes silt-clogged, its vegetation overgrown and untended, its ornate buildings and bridges crumbling, vandalized and graffiti-stained.

Too many rock concerts and ethnic festivals and organized ball games; too little money from a city financially hard-pressed; too many short term park commissioners who treated the park as just another chunk of land in a citywide system, had nearly been the death of Central Park. BUT THERE WAS a group of New Yorkers, within and without government, who did not want to lose the flagship park. Their persistence resulted in two important developments: First was the naming of a Central Park administrator, a new, experimental post that in 1979 went to an urban planner and art historian named Elizabeth Browning Barlow a quick-smiling and determined woman who four years earlier had organized a private group called the Central Park Task Force. The other was the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the renewal of the park and the raising of private funds to that end. From the efforts of Barlow and her dedicated staff, the members of the conservancy, the private Central Park Community Fund and the city Parks I 110thSt- jfl Im.

CENTRAL 1 97 PARKf I VgXJ 85 I 59th St. Department emerged an elaborate plan for the regeneration of the park, which had been without an active landscaping plan for more than half a century. TODAY, A MASTER plan is nearing completion, and already some of the work is finished. The dusty, hard-packed Sheep Meadow so named because sheep once grazed on its rich grass was resodded, and is once more a verdant oasis. In the warm weather it will again be a haven for sun worshipers and Frisbee tossers not, Barlow warns, organized ballplayers.

That activity will be reserved for other spots, such as the Great Lawn to the north. Evergreens are being planted along Winter Drive, that stretch of the upper West Side park road so Numbers 1-9 represent areas of park set for designated by Olmsted, who himself had evergreens set there. Bridges are being restored. That prime target for vandals. Belvedere Castle, which rises on the highest part of the park north of the heavily wooded Ramble, is being restored to former glory.

Virtually unused for years, it will be turned into a children's environ- mental educational center run by the conservancy, g. THE SMALL, POPULAR Children's Zoo, behind the arsenal off Fifth is virtually empty of 13 animals; they have been moved elsewhere. Its cages will be razed and it will be rebuilt, under the 2 direction of the New York Zoological Society, and 8 reopened in 1986 as an animal "habitat." The vandalized 110th St. boathouse will be rebuilt and a snack bar added. The Maine Monument, at the park's southwest entrance, has been restored, as has the southeast See PARK Page 55.

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