THE VILLAGE HILLS.(Leonie Haimson, Save the Mounds)(Interview)

Leonie Haimson, who lives just off Washington Square Park and heads a group of Village residents informally known as Save the Mounds, has been advised that, for public-relations reasons, it might be better to refer to the three asphalt bumps in the southwest corner of the park, threatened with demolition by the Parks Department's renovation plans, by the term "hills." '' 'The Hills' sounds less silly," she said the other day, sitting on a bench with some fellow mounds defenders, not far from the objects of their attachment. In truth, the mounds, each of which is about six or eight feet high, are hills to about the same degree that Washington Square Park is square. But they are, as Haimson pointed out, all that the Village offers in the way of elevation; and they are sufficiently beloved for two thousand neighbors to have signed petitions protesting their destruction.

"Generations of children have played on these mounds--my daughter took her first running step on them," Haimson said as her son, Nathaniel, who is six years old, frolicked on the mounds' cracked and weedy surface. Another advocate, Suzanne Dickerson, said that her daughter Erin, now a junior at Yale, had played there avidly for years. "I credit her athletic ability to those mounds," she said. "I really think it developed her calf muscles. She was a competitive track runner all through elementary school, until she switched to swimming."

The mounds were created in 1971, when, with the construction of two new children's playgrounds, the park--which until the mid-sixties was a turnaround point for the Fifth Avenue bus line--was rededicated as a place for leisure. Robert Nichols, who was the project's landscape designer, says that the mounds and the play area around them were inspired by the so-called "adventure playgrounds" that he had seen in Scandinavia. Although they were built for children, the mounds have been adopted by Villagers of all ages: hundreds of people mounted them this past winter with sleds in tow; and, until about five years ago, a theatre group used their valley as a natural amphitheatre for productions of Shakespeare and Sophocles. Over the years, however, the mounds fell into disrepair--an instance, Nichols believes, of malign neglect on the part of the Parks Department, inspired by the earlier ...