June 2, 1996

Flexing the toe of her sneaker, Sheila Ingram digs through the patchy baldness of the lawn in Oscar E. Miles Village, a new public town-house project in the heart of Newark. Every few minutes she unearths an inch-long broken glass vial with a tapered blue, red or green plastic screw top and displays it triumphantly. "This place is a drug haven; they sell just as much here as they did in the towers," she says, scoffing at a neighbor who argues that the low-rise developments have brought nothing but good.

A free concert on Wednesday at Castle Clinton, with a 12-piece orchestra and Broadway singers, will be part of the ground-breaking ceremony for a $5.5 million restoration of the Battery Park Seawall and Promenade -- which in turn is part of a $25 million restoration of the historic park. Battery Park, where Fort Amsterdam was built by the Dutch in 1626, attracts three million tourists a year, but has been allowed to decay into a place where there is "lumpy paving and drainage so bad it puddles when it rains," said Warrie Price, president of the Conservancy for Historic Battery Park, founded two years ago.

TONIGHT'S TONY AWARDS, TO BE broadcast at 9 on CBS, signal the end of the 1995-96 Broadway theater season, one that seemed to elicit as many opinions as this year's Tony nominations. Recently, the New York Times critics Vincent Canby, Ben Brantley and Margo Jefferson traded impressions about the season on Broadway and beyond. The moderator was Peter Marks, the Times's theater reporter. Peter Marks: Any overall thoughts about how good, how bad artistically this season has been? What stands out about how it progressed?

TALK about frustration. You've been shopping for a home, and despite having serious money to spend, you have yet to see the house of your dreams. Is it too much to ask for something special? Something with bragging rights, something that would make friends ooh and aah? Well, then, consider these gems now on the market here:

After two weeks of political turmoil, India got another new Government today, but even before the new Prime Minister took office there were signs that he may have trouble holding together a fractious 13-party coalition that almost broke apart in last-minute wrangling over Cabinet posts. For many Indians, it was a sobering moment as the political establishment gathered for the swearing-in of the country's second Government in 17 days.