Dear Editor: I “camped out” at Sinatra Park about 6 a.m. on the fourth, while my family yet slept. I used this quiet time to catch up on some reading, issues of The Smithsonian magazine that I rarely get to. One article was about a place called Polyface Farm, where cattle, chickens and rabbits are raised without ever buying fertilizer, seeding the fields or medicating the stock. It’s done by the mix of usages, disregarding the factory homogenized mentality of modern farming. The customers swear that it’s product taste like food did 30 years ago. This article would come back to haunt me that same night. When foreign visitors and kids were all aghast at “the largest display of fireworks ever,” I couldn’t help but be really disappointed. I was directly across from a wide swath of spectacular bursts, but many were obscured by the skyline, and the rest were distant enough to be blotted out by my thumb. There was more to my right, obscured by the WTC, and yet more to my left, and much closer, but obscured by the cliff. All the hours that I had waited, and yet I would have gone home right at the start, if not for my 8 year old’s pleasure. My problem was, that 30 years ago, we’d grab some blankets and run up to our roof just as the fireworks started in the nearby park. There was no soreness and irritation from waiting, no large expense on food and cheap toys. We were only two blocks away and the view was incredible. To twist a phrase, “quality has a quantity of its own.” Last night may indeed have been the biggest display ever, but I’d trade it in a second for a small display at the local park, watched from my roof. Maybe someday we can get the city to stop relying on N.Y. for fireworks, but we’ll not remove the three towering buildings that now stand between my 3.5 story home and the park. You likely didn’t have my childhood view, but maybe you walked to a job in a building that is now residential. Now you have the irritation of commuting. Maybe you had a peaceful street, or a park without a building slapped up against it. Whatever it was, it was a “quality of life” that is being eroded. Does a parking garage now stand where your grandmother used to live, as in my case? This is why people are fighting the construction boom. Every promise dangled by builders, has a cost that goes unmentioned, paid a memory at a time, paid in stress and health and disappointment. F. Haas P.S. I do love the new parks, something has been gained for all that is missed.