Battery Park residents will meet tonight to take stock of Richmond's progress in restoring the park.

It's been almost two years since it was devastated by a sewage-contaminated flood. Restoring the park is the last phase of recovery for the neighborhoods around Battery Park.

The Battery Park Civic Association will meet at 6:30 p.m. at the Stone House at Dupont Circle and Hawthorne Avenue.

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder said yesterday that the city has begun removing asphalt from five tennis courts that were damaged in flooding during Tropical Storm Ernesto on Sept. 1, 2006. The park already had begun to flood after a major city sewer line collapsed during heavy rains that preceded Ernesto.

The city also is rebuilding a public restroom building ruined by the flood, installing new playground equipment and benches, moving the basketball court to the site of former tennis courts on the south side of Overbrook Road, and restoring the baseball and football fields behind the former A.V. Norrell Elementary School.

Civic leaders say the city will build an amphitheater at the lowest part of the park, replacing the basketball courts there.Seventy-two families were evacuated during the flooding. Richmond has subsequently purchased and demolished a number of buildings on flood-prone properties that will become part of an expanded park.The city completed a major sewer line last fall to replace the nearly century-old sewer that collapsed more than 80 beneath a defunct municipal landfill next to Brookfield Gardens and Southern Barton Heights. Wilder proclaimed the rededication of Battery Park in early December, but some residents called the announcement premature because the park itself remains fenced off and unusable.

Wilder, in an update on his new Web site, reported on progress on each phase of the restoration project. The First Tee golf course, built on top of the closed Fells Street Landfill, will reopen Wednesday.