EASTERN PARKWAY On the Road To a Revival} Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway is a dilapidated shadow of its former self. But a $60-million effort is about to begin to restore the road and its tree-lined pedestrian promenades to their elegance of yesteryear. SEE END OF STEXT FOR SIDEBAR-Designers Of Urban Relief: [CITY Edition]

EASTERN PARKWAY had cut a wide green path across central Brooklyn for almost five decades before the IRT subway system was extended under its length in 1920. The trains offered a quick connection to Manhattan and transformed the bucolic boulevard and sidestreets into a booming residential area.

So great has been the demand for these plots, and so many buildings have been erected, there are today only six or seven plots available on Eastern Parkway from Prospect Park to Brownsville, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported in 1923.

Stately brick homes, high-rise apartment buildings and religious institutions, such as the Brooklyn Jewish Center, took shape along the parkway during the '20s. Stores that rented before World War I for $1,000 to $1,200 a year were bringing $2,500 to $3,000. And thousands moved into the area - half of them from Manhattan. The Eagle called the community as fine a body of middle-class citizens as are to be found anywhere.

Today, Eastern Parkway is marked for changes far more ambitious than any undertaken since the boom years. Mayor Edward I. Koch is expected to make a formal announcement soon of a $60-million effort to restore the parkway and its pedestrian walkways to an elegance of yesteryear. Plans for the stretch between the Brooklyn Museum and Pitkin Avenue call for planting new trees, resurfacing the six-lane roadway and the two service roads, and installing more durable benches along the promenades.

Everybody will be working on Eastern Parkway, said Enid J. Ford, district manager of Community Board No. 9, which counts the thoroughfare as its northern border. Traffic signals, sidewalks, water mains, drainage, streetlights - the scope of the project is voluminous.

It's taking a project of the last century and restoring it for the 21st Century, said city parks commissioner Henry Stern, whose agency will join the city Department of Transportation in the task. We'll be making it a parkway again, because in recent years it's been a parkway in name only.

The work, which is expected to begin in the next few weeks and last about three years, has been a long time coming. So long, in fact, that some residents of the area say they had forgotten that improvements were being prepared. After all, community...