Daily News from New York, New York • 97

ft lAJ-i crigr sellers are still out in force, but they have to compete with music, books, flowersand a Japanese artist IT crime is down (13 robbery arrests in the first six months of this year, compared with 46 in that period in 1981). The number of people using the. park in the daytime is up substantially. Restoring Bryant Park is not the sole responsibility of the library, either. The Avenue of the Americas Association, a business group, contri-butes money toward the concerts, as does the Music Performers Trust Fund.

The Midtown South Precinct been great," said Biederman) has increased the number of uniformed police in the park from two to six officers each day. They circulate, too, and their constant presence has made people feel safer. Life flourishes in every nook and cranny of the park. Kazuko, a Japanese artist, has been busy creating nine rope-ladder bridges that gracefully connect trees. There is a flower stand, the Bryant Park Flower Market, at the Sixth Ave.

entrance, that adds sweet smells and exotic flowers to the atmosphere. "Business has been great," said Faye Brown, who runs the flower market with Paul Koka. "We sell flowers to lady executives who put them in their offices, married men who carry them to the trains to take home, tourists, businessmen, even kids who bring them home to their mothers. Bryant Park has great possibilities. It's a nice place to do business and, frankly, a nice place to work." There are three bookstalls in the western end of the park, next to a fountain run by Strand, Fountain Books and Barnes Noble.

The stalls, which opened in 1979, all do a brisk businss. "Since the park added the music concerts and beefed up the police force, business has picked up marve-lously," said Joe Rudnicki, manager of the Strand stall. "We do a very big lunch hour business with people who work in the area. Bookstores are a natural right next to the library. It's nice working here, too, because, right in the middle of busy Manhattan, everybody becomes very casual when they walk into the park.

It has a nice calming effect on people." Bryant Park still has its problems. After 6 p.m., when the musicians are long gone and flower market and book stalls are closed, people are once again afraid to go in. In the latest mugging incident, a businessman was robbed at 9 a.m. Friday as he walked through the park. Drugs are still sold openly, even in the daytime.

Men still move from one side of the park to another, mumbling, "smokes, "nickel bags, my man, nickel bags," despite the presence of police officers 100 feet away. There are still ominous-looking people leaning against walls. "It takes time to get rid of these people," said Biederman. "We have plans for night activity in the park that will keep these people out. I think, within a very short time, Bryant Park will free of this element entirely." Faye Brown laughs and says that the drug pushers are not totally bad.

"Every Friday around 5 p.m. they buy-roses from me for their girf riends," she said. Maybe the park is getting to them, too. By BRUCE CIIADWICK JUST THREE YEARS AGO, Bryant Park was one of the largest uncapped sewers in New York. It was a dirty, grimy park run by hustling drug pushers, populated by muggers and covered with the sleeping, foul-smelling bodies of unshaven derelicts in tattered clothes with nowhere else to flop for the night.

Since it sits right behind the New York Public Library, it was always a grotesque contradiction of that building's majestic beauty. All of that is changing. Today, after two years of cleanup and planning by the Bryant Park Restoration Bryant Park is rapidly becoming one of the city's loveliest parks, certainly safer than it has been and, with its summertime noon -concert series, an outdoor music festival. Thursday was a typical day in Bryant. At 12:15 p.m., Vishnu Wood and his Safari East Jazz Band started playing in front of a dozen listeners on the mall.

By 12:30 p.m., the crowd, following the sound of the music in from the street, had grown to nearly 200. All kinds of people were in the park to hear the music of Vishnu Wood. Several women stood on the edge of the grass pushing baby carriages back and forth to a gentler rhythm than that of the Safari East band. Lovers sprawled on blankets. Businessmen in three piece suits opened brown bags, took out carefully made sandwiches and ate lunch as the music wafted through the trees.

Several drifters fell asleep a few feet from the band tent. A few yards away, a Frisbee was flying through the air. One daily visitor is Dan Meehan, who works nearby for the New York Hotel Association. "I come here every lunch hour to listen to jazz. This is a great place.

You can take your shirt off, get a nice tan, and hear some great music. It's like a big picnic. I think attitudes are better when people can relax in a park in summer. In winter, you wind up stuck inside and you just don't feel right about things," he said. The musicians enjoy playing in the park.

"People really appreciate what you do," said percussionist Ray Mantilla. "And it's nice playing outside on a nice day. It makes you feel good." Vishnu Wood sees it as a challenge. "When you're inside, the audience comes to you. Here we're coming to an empty park and ourob is to draw an audience, an audience of people who may not be jazz lovers.

We have to work harder to get them and to keep them. Because of that, the re-wand is greater," he said. "The music concerts are one of the most important parts of our campaign to restore Bryant Park to the greatness it once had," said Dan Biederman, head of the Restoration Corp. (The corporation is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation). "Music draws a lot of people into the park, people who, frankly, have been afraid to go in the park.

They come in and they realize that, hey this place has really changed. This is a nice place to go. Then they TONY PESCATORE MILV NEWS Strolling by the fountain (above) and browsing for books and cassettes: After a decade of disuse, the park is again becoming a lunch-time hangout. 3 ID come back again and again." Bryant Park has a long history. It was started as a Potter's Field cemetery in the 1830s.

The cemetery was covered over in the 1850s when the Crystal Palace, an enormous trade emporium, was built (it later burned down). In the 1880s, the city named the park after poet William Cullen Bryant. In 1906, the public library was built at the eastern end of the park. In the early 1930s, the park drifted into the first of several sad eras. Thousands of homeless men.

out of work in the first bleak years of the Depression, lived in Bryant Park and the city found it virtually impossible to get them out. In a mighty, and unsuccesful, effort, Robert Moses redesigned the park, raising it four feet off sidewalk level. It didn't help. Everything is cyclical, though, and the good times returned to Bryant There were some wild celebrations there at the end of World War II. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the park flourished.

In tlie late 1960s, Bryant Park often was filled with thousands of antiwar protesters and armies of riot-equipped police. In the late 1970s, Bryant Park drifted into its bleakest period as it became a haven for muggers and drug sellers. "There came a point said Biederman, "when the officials of the library and the city said it had to stop. The answer, we realized, was not a wave of police. The answer was a total restructuring of the park.

That's what we've tried to do and, so far, it has worked." The police report that.