Newsday from New York, New York • 9

I THE STATE 0 0 A Flushing Meadows Stuck in Park But park best days lie ahead By Carol Polsky LUSHING MEADOWS-CORONA PARK, encircled and split by four highways, ia itself at a crossroads. Its path so far has remitted in an identity crisis. Up ahead lies what its advocates hope will be the park at the 21st Century. Although this four-mile-long park is to Queens what Central Park is to Manhattan and Prospect Park is to Brooklyn, this is no pristine vision of nature in the great 19th-Centuxy tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of both Central and Prospect Parks. This is builder Robert Moses legacy, a marsh-turned-ash-dump-tumedrfiurground.

Created for the 1939 Worlds Ftair and recast for the 1964 Worlds Fair, the park bears their imprint: the sprawling; flat layout; the scattering of decaying futuristic buildings; an outdated image. Now, after years of relative inactivity, the Parks Department for the first time has in place an administrator for Flushing Meadows-Conma Park. And it is moving ahead on a $80-million capital improvement project, which has been dormant since the beginning of the decade, that it hopes will iqject new beauty into this ungainly stepchild of the Parks Department. park has a lot of problems, said Parks Commissioner Henry Stem. First, its flat as a pancake; second, Please see FLUSHING on Page 24 tfe.jcu- felr -1 OT3 -'N-' Anna Palazzo soaks up some sun under the Unisphere, right, at Flushing Meadowa-Corona Park, and a bicyclist crosses the state quickly at the New York State Pavilion, lower right But much of the park is in need of dean-up and repair.

Photoaby Btcva Hart 9, 1968 3 0.