Daily News from New York, New York • 238

cue ILfiihH IPaurik Thisitt (GoTLoldl Undoing the mistakes of Bryant Park's past. By OWEN MORTTZ HEY PULLED the plug on Bryant Park last year. New York City's true central park it sits Bryant Park, now a giant cavity (opposite), will have two restaurants (above). $16 million construction of underground book stacks for the library. It's quite a sight a giant cavity, with workers scurrying around.

When that project is finished, it will be topped over by a vast new Great Lawn. Still, how do you draw good people in to chase out the bad? One way is kiosks there will be four of them that will sell food and beverages. There will be a lot more events and "happenings" as well, to draw crowds. "Since we're really not a residential neighborhood, we're going to have to treat the park as if we were downtown," says Biederman. That is, there will be public usages.

In this vein, the biggest controversy by far involves the planning for two restaurants. The idea is that restaurant-goers and the accompanying nighttime security would be a deterrent to negative presences in the park. Some years ago, restaurateur Warner LeRoy, best known for Tavern on the Green and the now-defunct Maxwell's Plum, had proposed a lavish $12 million restaurant, to be known as "Crystal Palace," along the back wall of the Public Library. LeRoy pointed to the success of the Tavern, the Central Park showplace, which generated more business than any other restaurant in the nation in 1987. In truth, Tavern is on the perimeter of Central Park and few people regard it as a serious deterrent to crime.

LeRoy pulled out of Bryant Park in March 1986, complaining about the long bureaucratic process for approving the restaurant. He also expressed fears that the restaurant design would be reduced to "mediocrity" by the city's laborious approval process. He had spent four years and $500,000, he said, peddling the restaurant concept. If truth be known, LeRos eatery proposal was too large for Bryant Park. So were a number of other to page 2i at the midtown axis of 42d Street and Fifth Avenue was clamped shut A wraparound cyclone fence conveys the message to the public: Keep Out Designed and built expressly for the 20th century, Bryant just hadn't worked.

Now, in a turning point for New York parks and perhaps for the nation as well Los Angeles is exploring a similar plan Bryant Park is undergoing $20 million worth of the 3Rs redesign, redevelopment and restoration. The 5Rs, if you count restaurants and restrooms. When it's finished next year, the mistakes of the past undone, the new Bryant Park will be, says Daniel Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, a "place for the good people to go and for the bad people to stay away from." Bryant Park should have been an oasis. Once, it was among the most heavily used parks in America. But Bryant Park, unlike Central Park and other neighborhood parks in New York, was essentially a 9-to-5 park.

It is surrounded by office towers and commerce. There are no residential neighborhoods to service it at night and on weekends. Drug pushers took control at night then during the day. A more compelling reason for Bryant's marked decline was its misshapenness. What was right in 1934, when Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had the park rebuilt, had come back to haunt it Moses was excited by the notion of a park that would loom above street level, a park that would be a sanctuary from the commercial cacophony of 42d Street and the very city itself.

So, a small army of public works employees rebuilt it so that it was elevated four feet above the sidewalk. Then, the workers built a small wall and a decorative iron fence above that They planted thick shrubbery. Moses' park was indeed a sanctuary. It also had ceased, as one critic noted, to be "seeable" from the street By the 1960s, when street crime had become routine, the effect of the park's layout was to make the place a refuge for the bad guys. "Dead spots" simply allowed drug pushers to thrive in its recesses.

"Psychologically as well as physically, Bryant Park is a hidden place," urbanist William H. Whyte wrote in 1979, in a seminal report that prompted the park's rethinking. The place had become so underused, Whyte found, that drug dealers willingly filled the vacuum. Whyte's report for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund was blunt. The park had to be redesigned "to open up access" and actions had to be taken to strengthen maintenance and policing.

It took almost eight years to happen, but now it has. Last July 1 1, following final approvals by the city, the park was closed to the public. Meantime, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, under Biederman's direction, checked in. Having gained assurances of capital and operating funds from both public and private sources for the project, the BPRC set out to create a new park. Biederman, a former management consultant and community activist with long interest in the park, talks of a "first-rate urban amenity, a source of rest and inspiration and a hub of cultural and educational activity." To do this, the park will be lowered again to street level.

Four new entrances and a redesign of the two existing Sixth Avenue entrances are calculated to make the place more inviting. The interior cement and bluestone walks will be repaired and realigned to assure sight lines from the street Indeed, access is the key word. Seeing into the park will be easy. So will looking out The Master Builder purposely built low bridges over parkways to discourage buses and trucks, and he had the park's four statues so aligned that they blocked sight lines from 42d to 40th Streets. Bridges can't come down, but statues can and will be moved.

The place will be better lit at night, using the same "white light" that has worked so well along the Battery Park City Esplanade. The romance of moonlight will have to yield to the bright necessities of security. The Great Lawn, the park's signature, will be redone. But that will await completion of a mammoth project already under way, the 18.