Dear Editor: September 1999 was a great month for the many dog owners who bring their dogs to Elysian Fields park between 10th and 11th on Hudson. A sign went up in the park, saying that our neglected dog run was finally getting a make-over, and would be closed for renovations. Since this had happened to the two other dog runs in town, we were overjoyed that finally something would be done to ours. Flash forward four months to the present. What has been done? Approximately two (2) days of work, and the dog run is now worse off than before. Workmen took out the lamppost inside the dog run, leaving it pitch black at night and dangerous. Until cold weather drove them away, homeless men often took refuge at night in the darkness of the run, making it unsafe for use. The darkness also makes it easy to trip over the unfinished sprinkler heads that dot this barren strip of land, and this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. A sprinkler system was begun, only to be abandoned back in November, leaving the dog run a muddy mess with even fewer stones than before. Many owners don’t want to take their dogs to the run simply because their dogs get filthy there. As it stands now, the dog run is an eyesore, and a blight on an otherwise beautiful park. Dozens of residents like myself use (or try to use) the dog run several times a day, and want to comply with city ordinances which state that all dogs in the park should be on leash and only headed to or from a dog run. The disgraceful state of the Elysian Field dog run makes obeying these laws an odious task at times. All told, to put in a new sprinkler system and fill the dog run with new stones shouldn’t have taken more than several days, and already we are now heading into five months of this so-called improvement. If this is our tax dollars at work, I’d hate to see them at rest. Dan Saffer