Daily News from New York, New York • 104

METRO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD 3v .1 TANYA BRACANT1 Workmen scramble to finish new muitistoried entrance pavilion, which wDI welcome visitors to Brooklyn Museum beginning Apr! 1Z Museum redo is work of art WaitU you see what they did to the Brooklyn Museum. Hardhat plunked on her head, Joan Darragh, vice president of the museum's office of planning and architecture, leads me through the back door on a $2 tour of a $63 million and the Friends and Trustees of the Brooklyn Museum. It got underway in 2001 and is now crushed against the hard two-week deadline. "Our director, Arnold Lehman, says that when people come up from the newly renovated Eastern Parkway subway entrance, he wants them to be rewarded for mak rary way, while celebrating its historical facade." Darragh says there are three high schools in the vicinity, and when those kids walk past, she wants them to look in through the crystal-clear, iron-free glass pavilion and see people. "We want them to see more than another public building," she says.

"We reconstruction job. The project includes a new lob rv DENIS tiV HAMILL4 til ing the trip to the museum," Darragh says, pointing to the subway entrance. "So the MTA was kind enough to reconfigure the want it to look exciting and fun. We want them to come in." This desire to reconnect to the borough is probably why the "of can sit and read and gab on a sunny day overlooking Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's grand boulevard, for which they coined the word "parkway." When I was a kid, my mother taught us that if we ever got lost in Prospect Park to look around for the "bald man's head" that was the dome of the Brooklyn Museum and we'd find our bearings. That same dome has been a cultural North Star for countless millions of other Brooklynites since it was first designed by McKim, Mead and White in 1897.

Within its 562,000 square feet is the nation's second largest art collection. Bigger and better This new and exciting renovation will only make the Brooklyn Museum bigger and better and more alluring than ever a more people-friendly place that is filled with light and art and culture that helps make order of the chaos of life in the big city. And so it's fitting that when the new doors open, one of the first shows will be "Open House: Working in Brooklyn," featuring 300 works by 200 Brooklyn artists. If you haven't been to the Brooklyn Museum lately, you gotta check it out. And the best part is that the price couldn't be better.

The first weekend Saturday, April 17, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Sunday, April 18, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. is free. Just wait'U you see what they did.

DhamiUediL nydaifynews.com flooded ladies room, where she brags about the 1 1 stalls. "Women hate ladies' room lines," she says, showing off the diaper-changing area, and consulting with head plumber Vin-ny Impallomeni and construction manager Bill Allan about the arrival of new sinks. "When they were building the stalls, I sat on the toilet and told them where to put the toilet paper dispenser," she says with a laugh. "Believe me, this is important stuff." Back out in the grand lobby, Darragh points out the coat-check room, where the electronic information cone will be displayed, and then she cranes her head back and takes a deep breath as she sweeps her hand across the front porticos, a woman showing off her dream house. Mixing old and new brick support piers offer a sense of strength and might, a combination of the old mixed with the new," she says.

"We removed the 4-foot-thick bearing walls, replacing them with steel beams, and it just blew the place open, with a clear view right out into the plaza and the street, and vice versa, like we're connected to the community. We want people to experience the museum in a contempo-. by, a muitistoried new front entrance pavilion and a breathtaking public plaza with dancing-water fountains, cherry trees and a front stoop" of public seating, all of it extending a common-people-friendly welcome mat to the borough of Brooklyn. Darragh yanks open a door, and suddenly we're echoing through the sweeping, still-un-der-construcrion re-foot lobby, boasting five archways that offer unobstructed views through a brand-new sheer-glass pavilion that leads into an plaza and the tireless rumbling frenzy of Eastern Parkway. A dozen support piers have been exposed to the original bare brick, a new visitor's center has been built and the whole well-lighted entrance to the museum is now some 25,000 square feet three times the size of the gloomy original.

"We've also built the best ladies room on Earth," says Darragh, a gleam in her eye that her 20-year dream for this phase of the museum renovation, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects and built by Bovis Construction, will at long last be finished by what seems like an insane deadline of April 14. Darragh. splashes into the. subway entrance to face the plaza when people exit. And here's what they'll see." She points to two computer-controlled fountains conceived by WET Design, which did the fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.

On special occasions, they can shoot water as high as the 60-foot roof. The old, underused plaza will now have flourishing cherry trees, verdant lawns and other plantings. Rising from the plaza is the new "front stoop" (stoops have always been very important business in Brooklyn, the word deriving from the Dutch of wide, graded steps with Brazilian ipe-wood walkways that Darragh says she chose because they "sound like you're walking on the Coney Island Boardwalk." The museum will stage some programming here and will serve as a place where people Art," which had been pompously added in 1997, has been loped off and buried beneath the reconstruction debris of what is again just The Brooklyn Museum. "For some reason, the 'of Art just never caught on," says Sally Williams, a spokeswoman for the museum, adding that director Arnold Lehman believes the original name "had a clarity that communicated more concisely and directly to our public." In Brooklyn, where less is more, it had been like renaming our beach Coney Island by the Sea. (News Flash: It also drove newspaper editors nuts.) Darragh leads me from the grand lobby, across the pavilion and into the public plaza.

Back-hoes dig, power saws roar, electric drills whine and workmen scrimmage the plaza carrying beams and pipe on a job that was funded by the city's of Cultural Affairs 5 CM a..