Daily News from New York, New York • 7

The new look of the Bowling Green station (above) illustrates the modernization program under way. Sketch is cross sectional view of the proposed Flatbush Avenue Terminal of the Long Island It'll be clean, quiet, air-conditioned, safe, cheap and soon lng Green station in lower Manhattan is the future seen now. There will be new wall finishes, graffiti-resistant and aesthetically pleasing, new floor surfaces and new off-street entrances. Sound barriers will do away with a lot of the noise. Even public toilet will be refurbished.

But wait, even more is coming. Phyllis Cerf wife of the former mayor, is the MTA chairman for aesthetics. She has begun a campaign of "Operation Facelift," to provide new paint, better lighting, increased platform seating, window and door replacement and to examine what occupies space on the platform Wagner is even thinking of doing away with those subway concessionaires. Her squad of subway-eyesore snoopers has already, checked out some of the concessions. Frankly, says Wagner, she would rather see telephone and banking offices in subway mezzanines instead of those "pretzel-sellers." Along with the station upgrading is the prospect of more escalators.

Sixty escalators going 24 hours a day will be installed in 45 elevated and subway stations. Under the heading of amenities and safety, closed-circuit television to watch platforms and improvements in rail welding and signals will hasten train performance and ensure greater safety. Finally, while most of the theme is rehabilitation and reconstruction, look for a trio of breathtaking construction projects. One, is a $20 million Flatbush-Atlantic Ave. terminal for the Long Island Rail Road that will provide a new transportation and office hub for Brooklyn.

The terminal will increase LIRR capacity from five tracks with 38 cars to six tracks with 52 cars. It will link up with three major subway lines. Above the station will be a nine-story office building, complete with a supermarket. The major tenant will be th Veterans Administration. Old Brooklyn Dodger fans will remember that uch By OWEN MOR1TZ and RICHARD EDMONDS First of a series DT STARTS even before you board the Lex.

The station is bathed in light. Glazed brick walls surround you. The platform feels "clean. Gone are the bathroom-era odors, the dangerous dark corners that breed muggers. The station is so quiet you rub your ears in disbelief.

The train comes zipping in, a silver streak gliding around a bend. Arriving not with a rumble or throaty screech, as if it's doing you a favor just showing up, but gliding in, as if riding Hush Puppies. The subway car itself, now 75 feet long and gleam- -ing in stainless steel, is cool, cool, cool even as the street above you broils in the August heat. Glory be! You can see through the windows, and on the station walls, never is scrawled a discouraging word. You're riding in comfort now, in safety, over newly welded tracks free of clackety-clack, past one station after another as shining as the car, the ride so effortless that the whole subway system sems to have been born again.

And it has, 6r soon will be. What has just been described is the New York City subway less than a decade from now. Already, transit officials report, elements of the new system are coming into operation at an accelerating rate, and what better time than now, just as the subway starts its 75th year? Soon the rickety els and plodding trains with old-fashioned light bulbs, monumental crunches at rush hour and graffiti-splashed cars and station walls will be just unpleasant memories, the transit people promise. It's diamond jubilee time, and we're celebrating a $1.7 billion refurbishing of the subways. That's about 50 times the budget for building the city's first subway in 1904.

Eat your heart out, Houston and Los Angeles, not to mention Peoria, because ahead is a new look for the Grand Central subway terminal, a brand new downtown Brooklyn terminal, old stations completely made over and subway cars decked out for the 1980s. There is a new line to Queens, new hope and maybe, just maybe, some old-fashioned amenities like politeness and safety. For this birthday event, you must forget about today's filth and grime, the noise and the overcrowding, the sometimes surly behavior of transit workers and the occasional politicial sidelining of Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Har-, old Fisher. Instead, look ahead because massive renewal Is at hand. It's a six-year timetable, and Year One has just begun.

"In the next six years! we will be spending almost $2 billion on what I call the Old Lady," says Fisher. The program will upgrade the existing plant so that it can last another 75 years." Here's what's in store: The subway's vast fleet 5,600 cars will be retrofitted with air conditioning at a cost of $122 million. At least 90 will. Old cars that defy air conditioning will be replaced. Of the IRT's 2,800 cars, almost half of them 1,360 will be retrofitted with air conditioning by 1982.

The rest will be air-conditioned or replaced outright by 1990. Of the 2,760 cars on the IND and BMT, the so-called Division," 1,650 are new cars that came replete with air conditioning. Another 1,500 will be retrofitted and 610 replaced. Station improvements will mean all 460 stations Improved In some form over the next six years at a cost of $304 million. Eighty -four of the stations will be reconstructed completely.

The spanking-new Bowl-2 on paga 98.