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ALSO SEE QUEENS, MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN NEIGHBORHOODS FOR REVIEWS OF LOCAL PARKS
FLUSHING MEADOWS-CORONA PARK, encircled and split by four highways, is itself at a crossroads. Its path so far has resulted in an identity crisis. Up ahead lies what its advocates hope will be the park of 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-Century tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of both Central and Prospect Parks.
This is master builder Robert Moses' 1,250-acre legacy, a marsh-turned-ashdump-turned-fairground. Created for the 1939 World's Fair and recast for the 1964 World's Fair, the park bears their imprint: the sprawling, flat layout; the scattering of decaying "futuristic" buildings; an outdated image.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-Corona 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 inject new beauty into this ungainly stepchild of the Parks Department.
"The park has a lot of problems," said Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. "First, it's flat as a pancake; second, it's ringed with expressways, making access difficult. It doesn't really serve adjacent communities the way most parks do - the easiest way to get inside this park is by subway."
"It makes it a tough nut, a difficult park to plan," he said.
STERN CREDITS QUEENS Borough President Claire Shulman with his agency's new push on the park. While her predecessor, Donald Manes, envisioned the park as the new Meadowlands, a sports-recreation-entertainment mecca with a Grand Prix race course, a football stadium and all the concrete that money could buy, Shulman likes the park the way it is, or the way it could be. She told Stern renovating Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was one of her priorities.
Meanwhile, the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Corp. that Manes initiated - with Donald Trump and former Gov. Hugh Carey on the board - to promote his ideas has become a planning and fund-raising operation with new visions to complement the city's planning for the park.
"I think even...