The crowd at St. Nicholas Park looked into the dark expectantly, counting down.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six –”

Parents clutched cups of cocoa and hot cider and children danced around to keep warm.

“Five, four, three, two –”

Glittery paper snowflakes fluttered against the plaza fence, sparkling under the street lights.

“One!”

Hundreds of tiny lights leaped out of the darkness and the crowd cheered. It might not be Rockefeller Center, but the small tree donated by City College earlier this year glowed against the dark hillside.

The tree is permanent, symbolic of the increasing community involvement taking root in St. Nicholas Park since the days when most lights seen there flashed from police cruisers. Community members first got together as the Friends of St. Nicholas Park in 1995, their hope to reclaim the park from crime has grown into community priority.

“We though it would be a perfect opportunity to have a permanent tree and see it grow over the years,” Friends leader William Mullin told the crowd.

Longtime resident Fred Jordan, collecting winter clothes at the tree lighting for Blessed Trinity Baptist Church’s holiday coat drive, remembers when the park became a haven for criminals once the sun set. He looked around at the plaza, where an impromptu round of carols was beginning. “Five years ago or so we didn’t have this kind of thing,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have even come to this park 10 years ago.”

The first snowflakes of the season fell the previous morning as dogs ran around the dog run up the hill overlooking the holiday tree. Their owners chatted about upcoming events and issues with the park. At this casual monthly gathering with coffee and doughnuts, they pick up trash and check for damage – little things that can add up if no one cares.

Mullin’s black lab, Guffman, chased a stick past rocks that used to be a hub for drugs and anonymous sex. The entire area was overgrown and scattered with garbage, Yasmin Lauz said. Even old cars had been dumped there.

While walking her border collie, Nina, on a previous weekend, Lauz met a woman who remembered when the path along the dog run was an arena for dog fights and lined with crack dealers. “This area that the dog park is in used to be like their little needle alley,” Lauz said.

The park wasn’t always an overgrown urban wilderness sheltering drug deals and other shady activities, said Sybil Ward, who grew up on Sugar Hill. She remembers it as a spotless place where families strolled after church when she was young. But sometime in the ’70s the park started attracting a different crowd. Parents learned to keep their children away. Cautious citizens stopped walking through. “Nobody came to this park, nobody in their right mind,” Ward said. “And now you can walk through it. You see people coming in with their children and dogs to play.”

The turnaround began in the late ’90s, as the city’s overall crime rate was dropping and the city parks department hired a gardener. “It became more pleasant, and more people came in,” said park manager Mark Vaccaro, who made sure the lights were working properly at the tree festival.

The dozen people who form the dedicated core of the Friends of St. Nicholas Park are mostly dog owners, who started walking through as the park got a little better; their presence accelerated the park’s improvements. “A lot of the activities that were going on started moving out,” Lauz said. “Part of it is just having the foot traffic.”

This month marks three years since the Friends mustered more than 50 volunteers for a day of fence-erecting to finally build a dog run. The Friends raised the money and gathered hundreds of signatures to show community interest, and the parks department followed through by providing the land and a project manager.

The improvements since rely on the same collaborative effort: The parks department donated benches for the dog run; the Friends paid for the installation. Parks dumps a small mountain of wood chips a few times a year, and volunteers to spread it around the dog run.

“The dog run has brought people in and dog owners – as all police tell me at every meeting I go to – are the eyes and ears of the park,” Ward said. “They report every little incident and indiscretion that goes on.”

Drug activity and robberies have decreased, particularly in the past few years, said Officer Jason Harper of the 26th Precinct. He credited the dog run and programs like summer movies in the park for deterring loiterers.

The holiday tree is not the only addition to the park this year; notice boards were installed, new paths constructed and long-crumbling sidewalks replaced. July brought the official ribbon-cutting at the renovated basketball courts near 140th Street.

“We’ve put a lot of capital money into the big Harlem parks, including this one,” Vaccaro said. “Especially this one.”

Tourists will start flocking to Alexander Hamilton’s historic home at the north end of the park when it reopens next summer, and Mullin said the Friends are hoping visitors will stick around to explore. The group is thinking of ways to mark the historic Point of Rocks at the park’s south end, where George Washington’s army kept watch during the Revolutionary War. “We’re trying to find reasons to have all these tourists use the park fully,” Mullin said.

The holiday tree also represents City College’s increasing involvement with the park. Monthly operations meetings held there draw parks department and local law enforcement representatives to discuss any park problems. “We get updated on any type of crime or crime patterns,” Mullin said, “which – knock on wood – has not been a lot in the past few years.”

But most students still don’t bother coming into the park, Mullin said, after generations of City College students learned to simply avoid the park downhill from campus. City College’s public safety and security director, Lt. Douglas White, warns against venturing into the park after dark. “They’re doing a great job,” he said, “but you always discourage people from walking through parks at night.”

Some illegal activity continues, said Harper of the 26th precinct, and the park is technically closed from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. “I’d recommend that people adhere to those guidelines,” he said.

Plenty of neighborhood residents don’t visit the park often, either, and that’s part of the reason the Friends have hosted a St. Nicholas Day tree ceremony the past few years. This year 13-year-old Kimani Emmanuel, a student at the Harlem School of the Arts, played flute and a choir from P.S. 129 sang carols.

Actress Tamara Tunie, who plays the medical examiner on “Law and Order: SVU,” has made a tradition of reading “The Night Before Christmas” – otherwise aptly known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

“I think the more people we get involved in the park, the more they’ll demand that the park is kept up,” Mullin said.

With the tree lit and the cocoa packed away, volunteer Annette Wilcox was ready to head home after a chilly afternoon outside helping with the snowflakes. Investing time into the park – whether with glitter or a shovel – makes a noticeable difference, she said. “When you volunteer, you see a little effort brings a lot,” she said.