carousel grows in Brooklyn.

But it's heading off to Manhattan soon, to Bryant Park. And its creators hope that as the galloping steeds with flying manes go round and round, this classic of Americana will make children feel more at home there.

The new carousel — floral-hued, sparkling with mirrors, glittering with gold trappings and, yes, flaunting glass eyes — has been taking shape in a two-story former clothes-rack factory in East New York.

It is the most visible emblem of the return of carousel manufacturing to Brooklyn, once the teeming Silicon Valley of the merry-go-round. During the golden age of the carousel — from 1880 to 1930 — a host of Brooklyn woodcarvers pioneered a classic glitzy design called the Coney Island style.

Now, a team of venerable artisans working with young artists is putting the finishing touches on 10 painted ponies. "We wanted this to be unlike any other carousel that people have ever seen," said Marvin Sylvor, the carousel maker. "I think of this carousel as a field of flowers with ears and hooves," he said of the nontraditional floral design.

His company, Fabricon, and its 20 employees have occupied their 17,500-square-foot building in Brooklyn for four years, after moving from Middle Village, Queens. "Many American carousels got their start here, so we're continuing that heritage," Mr. Sylvor, 68, said, sharing his immodest goal: "We want to put carousels all over the world."

So far, so good: the 61 carousels that Fabricon has constructed over the last two decades are whirling not only in Riverbank State Park in Manhattan but in such exotic regions as La Paz, Bolivia; São Paulo, Brazil; Hong Kong; Macao; Auckland, New Zealand; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Singapore.

The new carousel will be installed next month toward the southern margin of Bryant Park, the seven-acre backyard of the New York Public Library, between West 40th and 42nd Streets, that has become Manhattan's unofficial town square.

The park will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its renovation on April 22.

The 12,000-pound, 22-foot-wide carousel will inhabit a tidy pebbled sitting area shaded by London plane trees, now dominated by a green lamppost and a 1932 bust of Goethe. The carousel will boast 14 figures — 10 horses and 4 "menagerie creatures," as they are known in the trade: a cat, a deer, a frog and a rabbit.

The carousel has the capacity to whirl 18 customers at a time — in 10 rides an hour — propelling them at a top speed of four and a half revolutions a minute for three minutes. Most of the creatures will be "jumpers," lifting up and down, powered by a mechanism that has not been improved upon since 1890.

This whole carousel brainstorm is attributable to Daniel A. Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, the park's private nonprofit benefactor. Mr. Biederman completed an intensive academic concentration on the carousels of Paris, Avignon and Marseille thanks to the ecstatic tutelage of his young son Robert in the early 1990's.

Though Bryant Park has been a rousing success since its reconstruction, Mr. Biederman wanted it to "appeal not only to adults but to parents with children, to school groups and to birthday parties," he said.

Mr. Sylvor is confident that the carousel will work its magic. "Carousels do wonderful things for people, and children never forget the moment when they first ride a carousel," he said.

Given the original inspiration, the music will be French, too — cabaret crowd-pleasers like "La Vie en Rose." That is perfectly in keeping with the Frenchified aspect of the park, designed in the 1930's not as a curving English-style greensward but as a symmetrical oasis with long flower beds bordered by rows of trees. Suitably, in its decade-old restoration, Bryant Park was given bright-pebbled Parisian-styled walks and 2,700 spindly green slatted-wood chairs from Thoissey, France.

Long ago, carousels defined their parks. Louise DeMars, executive director of the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, Conn., said that families used to pack picnic lunches, don their Sunday best and take the trolley "to ride one of the thousands of American carousels."

"But by the 1930's people began looking for greater thrills like the roller coaster," she said, and during the Depression most carousel makers, including those in New York, went out of business. "Today there are less than 200 operating antique wooden carousels."

Fabricon, she added, is only one of a half-dozen surviving American carousel makers. Mr. Sylvor, a 1958 graduate of the Pratt Institute, had established a successful store-window and display business before succumbing to his lifelong love for carousels, designing his first two decades ago.

Horses were once richly carved in wood, but had expensive maintenance problems given their construction from glued-together segments that warped in humidity. Although Mr. Sylvor employs woodcarvers to create new classic-style carousels, most of the demand these days is for merry-go-rounds formed from polyester resin reinforced with bristly threads of fiberglass, then painted in bright, fast-drying latex colors.

The surfaces are coated with polyurethane, to protect the paint job. As for the horses' eyes, they actually are glass, emanating from a taxidermy supplier in Woonsocket, S.D.

Nowadays, Fabricon's Beaux-Arts carousels can cost $200,000 to $1.5 million, depending on the size. Ms. DeMars calls them cutting edge, "given the design, the artistic quality of his carousels and the breathtaking painting."

Although it had been planned for three years, the Bryant Park carousel began to take physical shape in January.

Working from classic horse designs, Fabricon fashioned rubber molds to form new resin horses as well as the exterior 8-foot-wide "rounding boards" atop the carousel. Molds were also created to form the mirrored 8-foot-high "dog house panels" of pink, blue and lilac, which will hide the carousel's gear drive, powered by electricity.

The Bryant Park carousel will have an octagonal enclosure: rounding boards painted with a blue spring sky of puffy clouds. After being primed, then painted with a base color, the horses are given darker, shadowed highlights accenting the definition of the legs, tail and mane, "to give the horses a sense of motion," said Julia Polonyi, Fabricon's design director.

It takes three to five days to paint each horse, given their elaborate floral trappings of purple, yellow and red dahlias, roses and tulips.

"Each animal is absolutely individual," said Jim Kettner, 24, a graduate of the School of Visual Arts who is a member of Fabricon's team of seven creature painters.

Each creature also attracts its own acolytes. Jorge Rodriguez, 47, a Fabricon mold maker who has helped Mr. Sylvor build more than 50 carousels during nearly two decades, said: "My favorite carousel animal is the lion, possibly because I'm a Leo."

No carousel would be complete without a ticket booth, and Bryant Park will have a 7-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide paragon dating to 1928, from Paragon Park in Hull, Mass. Restored and painted with a tree-trunk and floral-design motif, it will offer its Victorianish tickets to customers for $1.50.

Although the effort to bring Bryant Park its first carousel wasn't begun until 1997, it took more than a year to find the right carousel maker. "I'd never have guessed that we'd end up building it in our own Brooklyn backyard," Mr. Biederman said.

It took years more to win approval from Manhattan Community Board 5, which twice gave the proposal a thumbs down. Finally, in December, it approved the construction of a more modest carousel that would usurp only 1,000 square feet of the park's 300,000.

"Bryant Park is an oasis in the midst of Midtown's freneticism," said Scott Isebrand, chairman of the board's Parks Committee. "We worried about blaring music and potential disruption."

Mr. Biederman promised that the sound would be regulated. "We foresee none of the negative carnival connotations: litter, gambling, rip-offs," he said. "What we do see is fun for those using it, and fun for those watching it."

Mr. Sylvor will assume the entire financial risk, absorbing the nearly $200,000 cost of the carousel; he will own and maintain it, as well. It may not take Mr. Sylvor all that long to recoup his investment, since 150,000 patrons are projected for the first year, a negligible slice of the park's 3.5 million estimated annual visitors.

And if Mr. Sylvor does meet with success, his contract specifies that a portion of future carousel profits will revert to Bryant Park to support its $3.5 million yearly operating budget.

Mr. Biederman is an optimist and has faith that the carousel will resist maltreatment. "There has been surprisingly little theft and vandalism in the park," he said, "and we are of the belief that if you do something really nice for people, they won't mess it up."