Mr. Durst is co-developer of a project on West 31st Street where demolition crews are clearing the way for a 58-story skyscraper that will have three separate lobbies: one for two dozen Franciscan friars, who will live and minister on the premises; another for scores of cancer patients and their caregivers, who will reside and work in their section of the building; and yet a third for hundreds of apartment renters, who will populate the tower's upper floors.

This is an unorthodox tenant roster, to be sure. But such are the realities of the city's modern real-estate landscape, where developers like Mr. Durst are turning to niche marketing consultants to help open their buildings to a more diversified group of tenants and walk-ins.

Coordinating the consultants' efforts into a cohesive bricks-and-mortar whole is a task that developers like Mr. Durst have had to approach with increasing finesse over the last few years.

"It's a challenge to make sure everybody concentrates not on their own egos, but on getting the job done," said Mr. Durst, who is working with lead developer Sidney Fetner Associates. "With three lobbies and three mechanical systems, it was very important that we get the various consultants for the various parts of the jobs working towards the common goal of solving problems and not trying to assign blame to people."

Of course, developers have always relied upon the expertise of professionals like zoning lawyers, architects and structural engineers to help guide their projects to fruition. And in some cases, they used retail, residential and commercial brokers to help market the building after it was finished. However, the last decade has seen these developers relying more and more on a new breed of marketing specialists who, beginning in the pre-planning stages, play a lead role in developing each component of a mixed-use project. This has had the effect of diversifying a pursuit that for the last century has been dominated by a handful of New York development families.

"Developers used to hang a sign on their buildings saying 'Apartment and retail space for rent,' and whoever approached the owner, that's who they made a deal with," said Faith Hope Consolo, a leading retail-development specialist.

But the business of development has become incredibly more sophisticated since then. Indeed, over the last decade, Ms. Consolo said, she has seen her business evolve from a traditional retail brokerage to a full-service pre-development consultancy firm.

"The development team that developers put together to market their property has become much more well thought-out, and the reason is that specialists like myself are able to tap the market more extensively," said Ms. Consolo, who is vice chairwoman of Garrick-Aug Worldwide, Ltd.

Indeed, the term "mixed use" has changed over the last few years. It once simply indicated that a building blended office, residential and retail uses. But the mixed-use developments of the last decade have begun to incorporate more imaginative uses, like hospitality or hotels; recreation, like gyms; entertainment, like theaters and concert halls; and now, apparently, even a religious ministry involved in health care. And as each new use crops up, so does the need for a marketing specialist.

"Real estate today is more than just a bricks-and-mortar business," said Scott Resnick, whose grandfather founded the venerable Jack Resnick and Sons Inc. development company. "Bricks and mortar are still important, but creative advertising and marketing is taken a lot more seriously by developers, ourselves included."

It's clear that this trend is not restricted to mammoth new construction ventures like the Time Warner Center at Lincoln Center, or the Bloomberg Tower on East 58th Street. Indeed, the mixed-use wave is now sweeping through one of the city's most august and iconic landmarks: the Plaza Hotel. Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva purchased the building earlier this year and indicated that he intends to convert many of the hotel's units into luxury condominiums.

And that might not be all. Jon Caplan, an executive director of the commercial real-estate services firm Cushman and Wakefield, which brokered the Plaza deal, said the new owners have not ruled out any other uses for their new property.

"It's at least going to be a mix of retail, condo and hotel," he said. "But they're exploring all possibilities right now."

And for old-guard specialists like Louise Sunshine of the Sunshine Group Ltd. and Adrienne Albert of the Marketing Directors Inc., who have been advising builders on the development and marketing of residential units for over two decades, the last few years have seen a more diversified demand for their services.

"Our role has gone from being local in nature to international," said Ms. Sunshine, chairwoman of the Sunshine Group. "We're involved in the pre-planning and subsequent sales for mixed-use developments from here to California, and we're about to expand to London."

In Mr. Durst's case, with his yet-to-be named skyscraper project on West 31st Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, the developer brought in Nancy Packes, president of Halstead Leasing Associates, to advise on the design and layout component of the project. He used Cushman and Wakefield to bring in the American Cancer Society, and Ken Lore of Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman LLP negotiated on behalf of the Franciscans for their new home. (The friars owned the land and the five buildings that used to stand on the site.) This was in addition to separate architectural firms for the building's interior and exterior. The coordination of so many development specialists was not without its complications.

"We had a difficult time in certain portions of the job getting the exterior work to everybody's satisfaction," said Mr. Durst. "The [interior architects] had a desire to get as simple as possible of a layout, and they were being pushed by Packes, who wanted more interesting layouts, and also by the [exterior architects], who wanted the building to have more shape and exterior reliefs."

In the Mix

Daniel Rose, whose family name ranks with those of Resnick, Rudin, Macklowe, Malkin, Helmsley, Tisch and Durst in the roster of New York's traditional development elite, quoted Woodrow Wilson to explain how he now handles his projects' myriad components.

"Wilson said, 'When faced with a difficult problem, I use all the brains I have, and the best I can borrow,'" Mr. Rose said. "Development teams today want to borrow the best brains they can to integrate all of a project's features and have them relate synergistically."

Carl Weisbrod, president of the Downtown Alliance and a former head of the city's Economic Development Corporation, said the most important lesson of the last decade is that none of an individual building's components can be afterthoughts.

"You can't say, 'We're developing office space-and by the way, we'll add some retail as well,'" he said.

Retail uses, in fact, have become so crucial to a given project's operating income that the larger projects can even support specialists for different kinds of retail environments under one roof.

"There may well be four or five different kinds of markets being served," said Mr. Weisbrod, "each of which requires a separate marketing approach, and which have to be linked together in some coherent program, but nevertheless have their own distinct environment and strategy."

And not only are developments' tenant rosters and marketing consultants becoming more diversified. So too are the methods available for developers to finance their projects.

"There's no question that the real-estate industry is becoming more sophisticated as more and more money is being allocated from investors to real estate," said David Arena, the chief strategy officer for Jones Lang LaSalle. Noting the rise of public REIT's (or Real Estate Investment Trusts, which sell stock in a bundled set of properties), private REIT's and an increasing willingness on the part of commercial banks to gamble on speculative office building, Mr. Arena said that now more than ever, "New York is where the rest of the world comes to learn" about real-estate development.

Nowhere is this phenomenon of creative financing and tenant consolidation more apparent than at the Time Warner Center. Completed in late 2003, the $1.8 billion behemoth was a joint venture of five different financial-development entities and includes a basement-level Whole Foods supermarket, a high-end three-story mall, four ultra-chic restaurants, the corporate headquarters and broadcast center of CNN, a five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel, a major jazz theater complex, and about 200 units of luxury condominiums rising out of the complex's two soaring obelisks.

Stephen Ross, chairman and chief executive of the Related Companies, which was the lead developer on the project, once boasted that the retail portion of the center alone would make the Trump Tower Atrium-a relatively massive mixed-use project when it opened in 1983-"look like a postage stamp." The coordination of so many consultants and constituents required a massive coordination effort on the part of Related and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architectural firm that designed the building.

"It was like hell," said T.J. Gottesdiener, an S.O.M. managing partner, only half-facetiously. "It was great tension. Obviously everyone believed that their piece was the most important part of the project …. Half the time, it was like pushing and pulling to get people to compromise fairly, and the other half it was like being a therapist."

Sometimes the therapy didn't work.

"Every now and then we had a stalemate, and Steve Ross had to walk in there like Solomon," said Mr. Gottesdiener. "There would be a conflict that we couldn't resolve; there was no architectural solution to make either one happy, and Steve had to stand there and say, 'This is what we're going to do.'"

Six long blocks east of the Time Warner Center stands another one of the city's most prominent recent mixed-use developments: 731 Lexington Avenue, perhaps better known as the Bloomberg building, named after the company whose new headquarters anchor the project. Located between Lexington and Third Avenues and 58th and 59th streets, the project houses 900,000 square feet of office space, two floors of retail space, and 100 condominium units in the building's 54-story main tower.

Vornado Realty Trust, headed by chairman Steve Roth, began construction on the building in 2001 and expects to finish next year. The project already has attracted the trendy clothing store H. and M. as its first retail anchor, and and celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles bought units even before the building opened for occupancy. (The intensely media-shy Mr. Roth declined to be interviewed for this story.)

A Stadium's Uses

One of the most controversial planned multi-use facilities in the city is the New York Sports and Convention Center, otherwise know as the West Side football stadium. In partnership with the city and the state, the Jets intend to build a stadium that will not only serve as the team's home but a convention center as well. In addition, the facility would house four or five high-end restaurants, a community theater, a small museum, an open-air market, and a ground-level cafe and retail space. And while some critics liken the stuffing of the facility with so many components to putting lipstick on a pig, the Jets regard the multi-use aspect of their facility as the project's strongest selling point.

The city's most ambitious mixed-use development project is undoubtedly the planned reconstruction of the World Trade Center. If built to the specifications of master-planner architect Daniel Libeskind, the complex will include five skyscrapers, underground retail, a massive transportation terminal, a memorial, and a cultural component featuring a performing-arts center and a museum.

Of course, even leaving aside the tragic circumstances that gave rise to its rebirth, this project is unlike the Time Warner or Bloomberg projects in that it is not a single building, but rather an assemblage of loosely linked structures. And, as such, it has many masters: the Port Authority, which owns the land; developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease from the P.A.; Mr. Libeskind; and Governor George Pataki, to name a few.

And although the state created the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for the very purpose of coordinating the various competing stakeholders at the World Trade Center, the project has suffered no small share of inter-consultant squabbles and outright battles. Mr. Libeskind famously squared off with S.O.M.'s David Childs over the Freedom Tower, the tallest building at the site; memorial architect Michael Arad is alleged to have tried to wrest total control of the project away from his taskmasters at the LMDC; and Mr. Silverstein is currently embroiled in intense negotiations with the Port Authority over the fate of the underground infrastructure and retail aspects of the plan, among other issues.

Recently, the LMDC created a subsidiary agency specifically to coordinate the actual construction of the myriad projects that are commencing simultaneously.

"We expect it to be an engine for the revitalization of the broader neighborhood," said Mr. Weisbrod, who is also a board member of the LMDC. "But ultimately the test is how these spaces are used, and whether or not they draw strength from their surroundings."

Bernard Nussbaum, the head of Mr. Silverstein's 20-strong legal team and former President Bill Clinton's personal attorney during the Whitewater affair, was feeling it when he took his staff to the ultra-trendy Tribeca eatery Megu for several rounds of congratulatory drinks not far from the courtroom where the drama unfolded.

"The mood was both ecstatic and relieved at the same time," said Silverstein lawyer Eric Roth, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, who sipped gin-and-tonics throughout the toasting. "It had been a very hard-fought matter, and it wasn't always fought according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules."

One of the legal-team members, Marc Wolinsky, called the developer on the phone to deliver the news.

"He was over the moon," Mr. Roth said about his client's reaction.

Not long after, the 73-year-old Mr. Silverstein, turtle-like under his slicked-back hair and glasses, swanned through crowds at a benefit at Cipriani's on 42nd Street, where New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine was one of the lesser lights.

This legal victory did something much bigger than just thwack Mr. Silverstein's legal opposition: It made him the single most important person in the redevelopment of Ground Zero, the only man with the presumptive right to build and the only one with the private funds to do it.

And for a scion of one of New York's great real-estate dynasties-who had pinned his legacy, before Sept. 11, on his purchase of the lease of the two iconic obelisks at the foot of Manhattan-that was no small victory.

Mr. Silverstein signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center six weeks before they were destroyed, and since then he has often said that his contract obliged him to rebuild a full 10 million square feet of office space on the site. But could he? Monday's potential billion-dollar bounty may just prove the difference between being able to build only one tower on the site and being able to finance the five other buildings envisioned in the current master plan.

Architects like Lord Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Fumihiko Maki had already begun drawing for Mr. Silverstein-but then, architects are accustomed to designing to the size of a developer's ego first, and his budget second.

One downtown business leader said that even Mr. Silverstein himself had grown skeptical about his chances to complete a full rebuilding of the site without a substantial insurance payout.

"Larry was the first to say that the prospects of his financing the project without the extra insurance proceeds were very thin, and conventional wisdom agreed with him," said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business-advocacy group. "The design and infrastructure requirements for this site are considerably more ambitious than the original Twin Towers, and I think there were real questions-questions that Larry was the first to raise-as to his ability to deliver without additional insurance money."

Monday's jury verdict will give Mr. Silverstein a great deal more breathing room in his negotiations with all the stakeholders at Ground Zero.

"This is a project we've always had confidence in," said Charles Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, which oversees the rebuilding process, "But the additional $1.1 billion is good news, and it obviously makes Larry's position more secure in that regard."

For many on Mr. Silverstein's legal team, it had been a grueling three-year battle against 24 of Mr. Silverstein's insurers on the property-one that until Monday's verdict had yielded a nearly uninterrupted string of legal defeats. But with the jury's decision paving the way for Mr. Silverstein to collect a potential total of $4.6 billion in insurance payouts, the lawyers, paralegals and jury consultants who gathered round the boisterous bar at Megu finally had reason to exult.

At its nadir, the proceedings involved accusations that Mr. Silverstein was trying to exploit the Sept. 11 attacks for personal gain, and reached another nasty crescendo when the judge trying the case barred Mr. Silverstein from the courtroom for violating a gag order on public statements about the proceedings.

Mr. Nussbaum declined to comment beyond saying, "We were very pleased with the verdict."

For the past three years and three months, Mr. Silverstein has been arguing that the destruction of the World Trade Center constituted two separate attacks, obligating his 24 insurers to double their payout from $3.5 billion to $7 billion.

Earlier this year, he lost a trial against the majority of those insurers, but the most recent jury panel agreed with Mr. Silverstein's two-occurrence argument, which makes nine of his insurers liable for up to $2.2 billion in payouts, or double the $1.1 billion they would have otherwise owed. An appeal by those nine insurers is likely, however, and Mr. Silverstein still has to go to an arbitration panel before a final amount is decided.

Estimates for the build-out of the commercial portions of the World Trade Center site-which includes five skyscrapers and a sea of underground infrastructure improvements-run anywhere from $9 billion to $12 billion.

And in the wake of Mr. Silverstein's courtroom loss this spring against the majority of his insurers, when it appeared that he was going to have a maximum of $3.5 billion available for rebuilding, the developer's future on the site began to seem shaky.

Word leaked out that his landlord, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was drawing up contingency plans for what might happen if the developer was unable to keep up with his $10 million in monthly lease payments, in addition to his obligation to keep pace on the rebuilding effort.

This, in turn, encouraged critics of the rebuilding process, like Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association, to begin suggesting publicly that it was time to rethink the entire programming on the site, perhaps to include residential development at the expense of commercial.

But the advent of a potential additional $1.1 billion in Mr. Silverstein's coffers insulates him from those attacks. To be sure, Mr. Silverstein now has enough to build the Freedom Tower, the first building planned for the site, and likely the next one as well. After that, he will likely proceed by trying to borrow against the equity in those two structures.

This is a strategy that Mr. Silverstein said he would employ even before Monday's verdict, but one that looks significantly more likely to succeed with two buildings to borrow against, instead of just the Freedom Tower.

"Obviously, this strengthens his position in the overall redevelopment, in that it makes it less likely that those who would want to remove him from the site would be able to do so-because he's got a significant amount of money," said an official familiar with the rebuilding effort. "It's a significant change in circumstances from the day before the verdict."

The rebuilding official also denied the suggestion that Mr. Silverstein's recent victory will require people like himself to recalculate the developer's relative power and influence at Ground Zero.

"I don't think this changes how people on the inside are dealing with Larry," said the official. "There were always people yipping from outside, saying we had to get rid of him, but that never got to the point where there were any plans to remove him. This only reinforces the status quo and increases the momentum in moving the project forward."

The official likewise dismissed speculation that Mr. Silverstein would attempt to use his expected windfall to build several smaller towers on the site, thus preventing other developers from muscling in on his territory.

"He signed numerous agreements, including his lease, to keep the 10 mil square feet on the site, so he's locked into the buildings laid out in the site plan," the official said. "He can't at this point decide to build a smaller building, because he can't make up that building later on."

What remains to be seen is how much of that expected extra $1.1 billion Mr. Silverstein will have to use in underground infrastructure improvements, and how much he can spend on the towers. That issue was apparently not made crystal clear in his lease with the Port Authority, and a spokesman for the P.A. said that the two parties are negotiating that very issue right now.

Mr. Silverstein's apparent legal victory notwithstanding, there are some who still feel that the relatively murky nature of the developer's lease agreement with the P.A. should open the door to a reconsideration of the programmatic elements of the site.

Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the Regional Plan Association, charges that from the moment Mr. Silverstein embarked upon a rebuilding program that departed from a literal rebuilding of the original Twin Towers, it voided his obligation to rebuild 10 million square feet of space. Of course, because Mr. Silverstein's lease has not been made public, such assertions are hard to verify.

"We're not rebuilding the Twin Towers exactly as they were, so that immediately opens things up to an interpretation where you can take different positions on what his obligations are," said Mr. Soffin. "Do you build the exact same square footage, or should you take a fresh look at the market and see what makes sense from an urban-design standpoint?"

Mr. Soffin argues that there isn't likely to be a demand for the millions of square feet in office space that Mr. Silverstein's new towers will put on the market, especially given the fact that Mr. Silverstein's No. 7 World Trade Center, a 52-story tower he is building just north of Ground Zero from separate insurance proceeds, will likely hit the market within two years. Neither of those buildings has any tenants signed yet, he points out. But Carl Weisbrod, president of the Downtown Alliance, a business-advocacy group, argues that the buildings will come online over a long enough period to absorb all the vacancy and more. Mr. Weisbrod also argues that each successive tower that Mr. Silverstein builds on the site will help to create the critical mass necessary to make the site succeed economically.

"As each building gets built, it strengthens the market for the next building," he said. "It makes it easier to get financing and helps create a sense of place."

Ms. Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, who said she is currently negotiating with an organization to become the Freedom Tower's first private-sector tenant, said that she hopes the extra money will help Mr. Silverstein sweeten the pitch for his buildings.

"Assuming they end up with the extra money, hopefully that will help create the incentives necessary to attract tenants to these wonderful new buildings." Designer Accord at Ground Zero The Observer has learned that on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, all of the major stakeholders at the World Trace Center Site-the Port Authority, Mr. Silverstein, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the City of New York-signed a series of agreements and memorandums of understanding that officially spell out all of the nitty-gritty architectural and design issues related to the World Trade Center Master Plan.

The final signings, which took place in a conference room at the Port Authority's headquarters at 225 Park Avenue South, constitute the culmination of several months of negotiations between all the stakeholders and represent a codification of architect Daniel Libeskind's Master Plan for the site-a revised version of which he presented in early 2003. (Mr. Libeskind was not a signer to the agreements, as he is technically an employee of the LMDC.)

The series of agreements specifies in detail a vast number of the plan's technical details: the width and connectivity of the streets at the site; the exact footprints of and distance between each of the site's buildings; the makeup of the site's below-grade infrastructure, including the below-grade situation of all the truck-loading ramps; and the setbacks required of each of the towers, among others.

Officials close to the negotiations told The Observer that the signing of all these agreements was a necessary precondition for the seemingly unrelated deal between the Port Authority and the city over the issue of lease payments for the use of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. The official told The Observer that before the P.A. agreed to pay the city some $780 million in back rent and interest, the P.A. had city negotiators agree to resolve all the outstanding issues at the World Trade Center, which the P.A. owns.

"The city wanted the P.A. to pay a reasonable number for its use of the airports, and the P.A. wanted to finalize the master plan," said the official. "All parties always have a way of using leverage to come to a universal agreement."

One notable aspect of the agreements pertains to the relationship between the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower, which was designed by lead architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and the adjacent performing-arts center, to be designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, of Bilbao fame. Both buildings are slotted for the north end of the site, and according to the agreement, they will be separated by 60 feet at their base. But in a sign that Mr. Childs is feeling somewhat less territorial about his Freedom Tower compared to this time one year ago-when he famously feuded with Mr. Libeskind over the design of the tower-Mr. Childs and Mr. Gehry have agreed to leave open the question of how much Mr. Gehry's building will be allowed to cantilever towards the Freedom Tower as they both rise. And considering Mr. Gehry's predilection for wild undulation in his forms, coupled with the importance of making the Freedom Tower the most distinct, iconic structure at the sight, this is perhaps no small matter to be left in the air. However, by all accounts, Mr. Childs and Mr. Gehry have a longstanding respect for one another's talents, which should preclude the possibility of another ugly battle over the Freedom Tower's future.

"Once I'm onstage, though, I can totally turn it on," Mr. Fahey added quickly.

Mr. Fahey guesthosted The Late Late Show for Craig Kilborn during the week of Thanksgiving. Forty-two-year-old Mr. Kilborn has left the show, which he has helmed for five years, in order to pursue writing, producing and television projects. However, it can't be ignored that Mr. Kilborn (who told The Observer last December that he's "been coasting") never really found a place in the hearts of viewers and, over time, seemed to let himself burn out, dry up and blow away into irrelevancy. Besides Mr. Fahey, there are three other contenders to replace Mr. Kilborn, including comedian D.L. Hughley, The Drew Carey Show's Craig Ferguson and VH1 talking head Michael Ian Black. Each of them will have a week to audition as guest host before Mr. Kilborn's successor is announced next month-kind of an Apprentice for talk-show hosts. To make it to the final four, Mr. Fahey and the others beat out over 20 competitors who also auditioned their hosting abilities with a one-show stint, including SNL's Ana Gasteyer, Tom Arnold, Aisha Tyler, Drew Carey, Amy Sedaris and Adam Carolla.

Mr. Fahey is certainly the dark-horse candidate. With under three years' experience hosting the popular video-countdown program, he would have to convince audiences not only to fight the sleepiness that comes from bingeing on tryptophan-infused turkey, but to see past his baby face and teenybopper associations.

The Transom asked Mr. Fahey why he thinks he's made it this far. "It's my abs," he deadpanned, but then shrugged. "The people I'm competing with are old. I bring in a youthful feeling to the show."

Whether he will also bring the coveted 18-to-34 demographic remains to be seen. Will the MTV generation-a group so apathetic that it couldn't even get out of bed long enough to "Rock the Vote" this year-stay up and tune in to see one of their own? Will everyone else listen to a boy-man who looks like he isn't old enough to have had the chicken pox?

From the age of 14, Mr. Fahey worked nights D.J.-ing by himself at the WMAS radio station in Springfield, Mass., next to a club where he says the motto was "Tuesday nights, women drink free; Wednesday nights, men get stabbed." One night, he walked outside and bumped into two clubgoers having sex up against the wall of the radio station. Mr. Fahey's dad was always there to pick him up at 6 in the morning.

Jobs outside of radio were failures. When he was 17, he got a job roofing on top of the Lego building in Infield, Conn. While he was there, one of the guys fell off the roof into a vat of hot tar and suffered third-degree burns. Mr. Fahey quit after the second day. "That was the extent of my manual labor," he said "Now I wear makeup and talk to Hilary Duff."

During his brief stay at Northeastern University, he D.J.'d at KISS 108, but dropped out when he nailed an audition at MTV and became the host of TRL two weeks later.

After filling in for Mr. Kilborn, he received a call from the head of Worldwide Pants, David Letterman's production company, which also produces The Late Late Show. Mr. Fahey was stretched out on his couch eating three-week-old cheese out of his mini-fridge when they told him he'd made it to the final round. "I'm not wearing pants," he blurted out at the time. "Let me find my pants and I'll get back to you."

The night after our meeting at the pizzeria, Mr. Fahey gathered with friends Bryan Terry and Joel Solomon over Blue Moon beers at Mr. Bigg's on 10th Avenue at 43rd Street. The three of them met when Mr. Fahey came to MTV, where Messrs. Terry and Solomon were employed as writers. That night's pitch session would help determine what the show wants to be when it grows up. Because the producers wanted a lot of pretaped elements for the show, Mr. Fahey and Co. needed to brainstorm ideas for bits and skits.

Early on, there were intimations of Jimmy Kimmel's unrehearsed jackassery:

"Are you allowed to shoot turkeys?" someone asked.

"No, you can't kill animals on TV," Mr. Fahey answered.

"Oh." Pause. "What about paint-balling them?"

Later, when live coverage of Ol' Dirty Bastard's funeral was shown on TV, there came ideas that would've appeared on The Chris Rock Show when it was on the air. Mr. Fahey remarked that if he were hosting this week, they could have done a bit about the fallen rapper's will. "You know, like his collection of gold teeth goes to 13 of his 57 children, his weed stash goes to Woody Harrelson and, finally, his gonorrhea goes to Paris Hilton-oh, too late!"

Then there were shades of Conan O'Brien's self-deprecation. Mr. Terry wanted to do a sketch titled "Damien Phones His Celebrity Friends." It would poke fun at both his friend's quasi-celebrity status and L.A.'s insincere "Call me if you're ever in L.A." atmosphere: "You call Tom Cruise and it turns out he gave you the number of the Scientology center. You call Ashlee Simpson and it's silence on the line and you say, 'Trust me, she's talking-you just can't hear her!'"

Then there was the just plain wrong: "How about People magazine's Least Sexiest People Alive?" Damien pitched. "You know, with Rush Limbaugh, Seal, the girl that got bit by a shark-" Everyone groaned. "Hey, they're jokes, people!"

Mr. Fahey was worried about pacing, jokes running out. Although the producers wanted more pretaped elements, Mr. Fahey's strong point is off-the-cuff banter, something he wasn't able to demonstrate the last time he guest-hosted.

"Waiting to find out if I got the job is like having three of the four winning lottery numbers. I can't have conversations with people because it's all I think about. I dream about it every night. In the dream, I don't get the gig. In fact, I do such a bad job that Kilborn comes back out of retirement to host the show and all his monologue jokes are making fun of me."

-Noelle Hancock

Curves Ahead

Despite a sold-out Tishman Auditorium and a stand-by line of fans that snaked through the lobby just to catch a glimpse of him, architect Frank Gehry insists that fame was never his primary motivation. But tell that to the professorial types hastily name-dropping Parsons alumni or the eager M.F.A. students clutching New School ID's in hopes of getting inside. The rest of the Gehry groupies spilled out onto 12th Street, bitterly smoking cigarettes.

"We never thought we were going to get famous," Mr. Gehry told his audience on Nov. 29, regarding the feeling among young architecture students over four decades ago.

At age 75, Mr. Gehry is certainly a legend in the field of architecture; yet for the countless awards and accolades he's received over the years, there's been plenty of criticism. Even so, the packed auditorium testified to the rock-star-like devotion that still greets him regularly at public events.

New School University president Bob Kerrey introduced Parsons dean and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who led the 90-minute discussion with Mr. Gehry. "Creations influence us as human beings," said Mr. Kerrey before kicking off "At the Parsons Table," a series of public dialogues with the "leading voices in the fields of art, architecture, and design."

For an architect who now claims that he "never wanted to do rich guy's houses," Mr. Gehry's done his fair share. In addition to intricate (and costly) individual homes, Mr. Gehry has designed many notable buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the new performing-arts complex to be built on the site of the World Trade Center.

The gray-haired, bespectacled sage sat comfortably on stage as Mr. Goldberger questioned him on everything from designing his own home to the elaborate structures that made him famous.

"I'm doing my own house," said Mr. Gehry, who admitted that he has to pay his own firm for the work.

"Can you afford Frank Gehry?" asked Mr. Goldberger.

The crowd laughed wildly. A few moments later, Mr. Gehry announced that the new home would have "no curves" and "no metal."

"Why?"

"Because my wife said, 'No metal' … and I can't afford curves."

Aside from the jokes, Mr. Goldberger steered the conversation back to the incredible architectural feats, such as Guggenheim Bilbao, which brought Mr. Gehry even more recognition, and a deluge of requests from countless cities in search of an architectural landmark.

"I turned down 98 percent … ," said Gehry, feeling that he could not replicate the effect of the Guggenheim Bilbao on demand.

One project he remained fairly tight-lipped about is his first major New York City commission, the cultural center at Ground Zero. Having written the recent book, Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York City, Mr. Goldberger seemed the ideal choice to engage Mr. Gehry on his design which will include four theaters, including new homes for the Joyce and Signature. However, the discussion was scant on specifics.

"I don't know if we'll make it," said Mr. Gehry regarding the deadline for the first design-February of next year. "We're just starting out … there are lots of meetings."

"Sounds like academia," replied Mr. Goldberger as if on cue.

However, Mr. Gehry was more willing to discuss his design for the new Brooklyn arena that is to house the Nets-another controversial development plan. Mr. Gehry wants to "create an intimacy" for sporting events that he admits to rarely finding in other venues. For both projects in New York City, described as an "intense kind of urbanity, there are challenges in both construction and dealing with controversial uses of land.

Regarding criticism he has faced over the years, Mr. Gehry says he is not deterred by the labels tossed his way, or pejorative remarks by critics and colleagues.

"The architects dismiss me because I'm an artist. The artists dismiss me because I'm an architect …. Whatever you do is what you do."

This honest, yet somewhat defiant, attitude struck a chord with many young architects and design students who lingered about the auditorium even after the architect had left the building.

"We always want to become famous," said architect Mauro Bianucci about the current situation. "The media make us run after that."

"I was very curious to see him talk," said Ernesto Klar, a Parsons M.F.A. student in design. "It was refreshing to see him as a humble person-unpretentious."

The last question of the evening was lobbed anonymously from the floor, asking for Mr. Gehry's personal take on the newly renovated MoMA, designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

"I haven't been inside," said Mr. Gehry. At first it seemed like he was avoiding the question, before making a pained confession.

"I couldn't get in," he claimed. "The line was too long."

Some rock star.

-Michael Calderone

Mixed Message

When the Olympics bill comes due, could the city be in for a true headache?

For several months now, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff has insisted that there is a limit to the amount that city or state taxpayers will be liable for if New York wins the right to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, and if those games then go over budget.

That assertion seems be beyond debate, since the State Legislature passed a resolution in 2001, which limits the city and state's Olympics liability at $250 million. But on Nov. 17, the Daily News reported some comments by Mr. Doctoroff that seem to contradict this position: "Doctoroff told The News that a draft copy of the 'host city agreement,' a document the city must sign if awarded the Games in July, makes city taxpayers liable for any shortfall. The city is negotiating with the International Olympic Committee to change that provision, Doctoroff said."

So, according to the News, Mr. Doctoroff is now saying that the city is liable for all cost overruns, not just $250 million.

Critics of the city's Olympics bid have long asserted that the I.O.C. requires host cities to assume full, not partial, financial responsibility for the Games. Indeed, the organization's own charter explicitly says as much.

"[T]he financial responsibility for the organization [note to editors: this is a British spelling of the word] and staging of such Games … shall be entirely assumed jointly and severally by the host city and the OCOG," reads a section from the charter. (The OCOG is a private entity that the city will create to manage the games. It has no revenue stream outside those of Olympics revenues, so if the Games do go over budget, it will almost certainly be the city, and not the OCOG, that will foot the bill.)

Brian Hatch, a former deputy mayor of Salt Lake City during that city's 2002 Olympics bid, said that as long as the 2001 liability-limiting resolution stays on the books, the I.O.C. will not award the games to New York. Mr. Hatch postulates that Mr. Doctoroff is aware of this, and will likely seek to have that resolution altered at some point in the next few months.

Mr. Doctoroff's spokesperson referred the issue to NYC2012, the city's Olympic bid committee, which was founded and headed by Mr. Doctoroff until he joined the Bloomberg administration in 2002. NYC2012's spokesperson, Jay Carson, declined to respond directly to the Daily News' story. Instead, he offered what has become the organization's standard response to questions pertaining to the potential costs of 2012 Games.

"The New York Olympic bid has built an extra conservative safety net into its budget to cover cost overruns," said Mr. Carson, who referred to the $250 million state-level guarantee, in addition to another $250 million in contingency funds already built into the budget. "This will more than ensure that there is sufficient cost protection for New York City and New York State."

A Daily News spokesperson declined to comment beyond saying, "The News stands behind its story." A spokesperson for the International Olympic Committee, after having several conversations with The Observer, did not respond to questions before deadline.

-Blair Golson

Waiting to Exhale

On the night of Monday, Nov. 29, Sigourney Weaver missed a screening of her new film, Imaginary Heroes, because she was busy attending the Los Angeles premiere with co-stars Jeff Daniels, Emile Hirsch and Michelle Williams. However, actor/director Jim Simpson dropped by the Sony Studios to watch his wife play a woman who takes up pot smoking in the wake of a family tragedy. We asked if he'd ever seen his other half, um, partoke offscreen. "She can't smoke pot," he laughed. "We've been married 20 years and there was one point where I saw her do it and she began to imagine that her shoe was a person. And even that was practically a contact high! It's really good acting is what it is."

-N.H.

"Well, we're going to build it," Mr. Doctoroff snapped, as though the matter were closed.

Mr. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development, has good reason to be confident-in his own abilities, as well as in City Hall's grand project. He has the undiluted support of his boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And when you command an awesome arsenal of city development agencies, as Mr. Doctoroff does, you believe that you can achieve that which others might consider impossible. As a result, Mr. Doctoroff has become the most powerful master planner in New York in a generation.

"Dan's getting more done than I've ever seen in my lifetime in city government," said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, the city's leading business-advocacy group. "It's the most ambitious planning and redevelopment vision since Robert Moses."

Of course, anyone who has that amount of power and ambition is bound to draw criticism. Primarily, Mr. Doctoroff's detractors say that he can be headstrong to the point of brooking no criticism. And because Mr. Doctoroff's influence permeates nearly every nook of the city's development engine, critics often feel powerless to speak out publicly, for fear of losing their jobs or lucrative business contracts with the city.

"Dan brings to the government his negotiating style from investment banking, which is a take-no-prisoners style, and it often creates more problems than it solves," said a real-estate executive speaking on the condition of anonymity. "It antagonizes people and creates unnecessary tensions."

A state-level development official had similar criticisms about Mr. Doctoroff's style.

"You don't negotiate in politics and government the way you do on Wall Street," said the official. "It's a different area, it's a give and take, it's all about relationships."

In a telephone interview with The Observer, Mr. Doctoroff conceded that his background in the private sector has led to challenges in his current job.

"That parts that are harder, particularly for someone coming from the private sector, is that everything is more complicated," he says. "The system gives people, legitimately, a say in everything that happens, and you've got to respect that. So the level of communication required, the steps in the process required, it requires an adjustment in the way you have to think about the way you do things."

Ten years ago, Mr. Doctoroff founded the city's Olympic Bid Committee based on his belief that the Olympics would provide a catalyst for dozens of economic-development initiatives that had been languishing in New York's notoriously creaky development machine for years. And though he had to give up day-to-day control of the organization when he joined the Bloomberg administration in December 2001, that vision remains the central driving force behind huge-price-tag projects like the extension of the No. 7 subway line, the expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Center and the creation of the New York Sports and Convention Center-a.k.a. Jets Stadium.

In addition, Mr. Doctoroff is spearheading the effort to transform 59 blocks of the West Side into a bustling and airy new neighborhood of commercial and residential towers; he played a heavy hand in guiding the economic rebirth of Lower Manhattan; and though he doesn't get a lot of press for it, Mr. Doctoroff also spends a good chunk of his 16-hour workdays on some 62 economic-development initiatives throughout the five boroughs, including the rezoning and rebirth of the Williamsburg and Brooklyn waterfronts. And for his dual roles, he takes no salary.

Third-generation real-estate developer Douglas Durst said Mr. Doctoroff's consolidation of authority over all the city's development agencies represents an unprecedented level of coordination.

"It's the first time in my 35 years of experience that there has been an overall plan involving the deputy mayor and all the different branches of the executive portion of the government," Mr. Durst said. "And from a development point of view, that is a very good thing."

The 46-year-old Mr. Doctoroff has been able to consolidate such power in large part because of his synergy with Michael Bloomberg. Although the two barely knew each other before coming to office, Mr. Doctoroff shares two distinct traits with the Mayor. Both had been phenomenally successful in their private jobs-Mr. Bloomberg as the founder of a media empire, and Mr. Doctoroff as an investor of a fund headed by Texas billionaire Robert Bass-and neither had ever served in public office before they assumed their current titles. In Mr. Doctoroff, the Mayor saw a kindred spirit who might be able to bring private-sector discipline to public-sector projects.

Indeed, the person in charge of the Mayor's personnel search committee, Nat Leventhal, said Mr. Doctoroff's lack of prior government experience was one of his most attractive features.

"Most administrations are filled with people who have been in government before, but I thought it would be good to have a few people who wouldn't be constrained by the burden of knowing how slow government moves," said Mr. Leventhal, who was himself a deputy mayor during the Koch administration. "And he's a very smart guy, so I knew he would pick up whatever he needed to know as he went."

Peter Solomon, one of the city's first Deputy Mayors for Economic Development, and the man who gave Mr. Doctoroff his first job at Lehman Brothers in the early 1980s, said Mr. Doctoroff's success would have been impossible without his synergy with Mr. Bloomberg.

"Nothing else matters," he said. "Your powers are totally defined by your relationship with the mayor, and Dan has a wonderful relationship with this mayor."

The highlight-and the biggest flashpoint-of Mr. Doctoroff's tenure to date is, of course, the stadium, which will sit on a stretch of rail yards between 30th and 33rd streets, and 11th and 12th avenues, and would host the Jets, convention center events, and the 2012 Summer Games. It will require a minimum public investment of $600 million, with the Jets chipping in $800 million. Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan, who fears the competition of a nearby sports complex, has been spending millions on advertisements and lobbyists to derail the project. That battle became personal recently when Mr. Bloomberg finally baited Mr. Dolan to engage him one-on-one, and now personal attack ads are coursing through the airwaves with every trapping of a traditional smear campaign.

Much depends on Mr. Doctoroff's ability to overcome the legislative and legal hurdles that Mr. Dolan and a broad array of anti-stadium activists hope to throw in the city's way. The International Olympic Committee votes on its choice of five candidate host cities in July 2005; Mr. Doctoroff says that if he can't convince the I.O.C. that the stadium will begin its rise before that vote, New York has no chance of winning the games. More importantly, however, Mr. Doctoroff also says that the stadium is the linchpin of his plan to develop the entire West Side.

And despite Mr. Doctoroff's efforts and successes in the outer boroughs, a collapse of the West Side plan would be a huge public defeat and embarrassment, one that suitors to the mayoralty like City Comptroller William Thompson, Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer, and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, might have little problem exploiting during next November's election.

It takes a special kind of ambition-some might say hubris-to imagine that a political neophyte could cut through the Gordian knot of the city's gnarled economic and development landscape, and get all of it done. Mr. Doctoroff said he drew his inspiration from Sept. 11.

"I'm a student of New York history, I read a lot of books about it; and I'm a believer that in times of crisis, New York has taken the great leaps forward," he said. "In the wake of Sept. 11, people seemed very committed to rebuilding the city and making it better than it had ever been. So it was the notion of that spirit, and my reading of New York City history that convinced me that this would be a unique moment to make a difference."

Mr. Doctoroff wakes up before sunrise most mornings to ride his bicycle from his family's Upper West Side brownstone to City Hall. He has three teenage children with his wife, Alisa, a prominent Jewish civic leader who is president of The Abraham Joshua Heschel School's board of trustees. Though he was born in New Jersey, Mr. Doctoroff's father moved the family to Michigan when he was a toddler. His father was an FBI agent but retired soon after the move; his mother was a psychologist. Mr. Doctoroff got his undergraduate degree from Harvard, during which time he worked for a political pollster-his only government-oriented job until becoming Deputy Mayor, and later enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School. During a summer job at a large Philadelphia law firm, Mr. Doctoroff was assigned to work on a takeover attempt by Texaco of Getty Oil.

Mr. Doctoroff then talked his way into an analyst job at Lehman Brothers, where he quickly impressed Mr. Solomon with his knack for the business.

"He was one of our real stars," Mr. Solomon said, "one of our two best analysts." He followed that posting with a 10-year career investing financier Robert Bass' money at Oak Hill Capital.

On July 13, 1994, a friend invited Mr. Doctoroff to go to Giants Stadium to see a World Cup semi-final game between Italy and Bulgaria. He was not a soccer fan but decided to go for the novelty.

"I trudged out there with no expectations, and as soon as I walked into Giants Stadium, it became immediately clear to me that this was the most extraordinary spectacle I had ever seen," he said, "The stands were filled with screaming, stomping Italians and Bulgarians, and it was so intense you could not sit down for the entire game."

Mr. Doctoroff had been to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Final Four, and had even seen the Rangers win the Stanley Cup the month prior, but nothing topped the intensity he had found in Giants Stadium-and it was all due to the national passion that was injected into the event. As the game went on, it got Mr. Doctoroff to thinking about the Olympics.

"I always loved the Olympics, but I was never a fanatic," he said, "And I wondered why what was clearly the most international city in the world had never hosted the most international event."

So for the next year and a half, without telling anyone except his wife, Mr. Doctoroff researched the possibility of bringing the games to New York.

In January of 1996, Mr. Doctoroff was ready to share his vision. He had a colleague set up a breakfast meeting at the Drake Hotel on 56th Street with Bob Kiley, who was then president of the Partnership for New York City. Mr. Kiley liked what he heard, and asked Mr. Doctoroff to make a presentation to his executive committee that April. Ms. Wylde, who was then head of the Partnership's investment fund, sat in on one of those early meetings.

"I have to say it did seem quixotic," Ms. Wylde said about Mr. Doctoroff's pursuit. "But he was completely committed to the Olympics and this project and had a clear vision of what he thought could and should happen."

At this point the city's future bid committee consisted of Mr. Doctoroff, one partner at Oak Hill, and a research assistant. That spring, Mr. Doctoroff also made a presentation to Mayor Giuliani. As if to underscore how much of a political neophyte Mr. Doctoroff was at this point, he got lost on his way to his presentation for Mr. Giuliani.

"Despite having worked downtown for years, I had never been to City Hall before," he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Giuliani got excited by the plan, and on the strength of that, Mr. Doctoroff formed the actual bid committee, initially bankrolling the entire operation out of his pocket before spending several years luring in members of the city's cultural and business elite to make donations and sit on his board of directors.

In 1999, Mr. Doctoroff landed Michael Bloomberg. The two became cordial: they sat next to one another at a dinner here or there, and Mr. Doctoroff would stop by Mr. Bloomberg's office when business took him to the company, but otherwise they remained acquaintances.

As the various deadlines for the selection process approached, Mr. Doctoroff's group's work intensified. And on Nov. 3, 2002, the United States Olympic Committee selected New York over San Francisco to compete against the other world capitals vying for the games.

About a year earlier, Mr. Bloomberg had won the city's mayoral election, and he appointed Mr. Leventhal head of his transition and search committee. The former deputy mayor immediately thought of Mr. Doctoroff to execute the Mayor-elect's economic development strategy.

"I knew what the job required," said Mr. Leventhal. "It was self-starting initiative and creativity and a quality of not being confined by regular bureaucratic way of thinking. I never had anyone else [besides Mr. Doctoroff] in my mind."

Initially, Mr. Doctoroff was not interested. Not only was he already juggling the demands of his Oak Hill and Olympics responsibilities, but his father had just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.

"I think the problem was he had to think long and hard before he agreed to give up his day-to-day control over the Olympics effort," Mr. Leventhal recalled. "That took convincing, only in the sense of giving time to think that overall he could do much more good for the city as a whole in this job, including the Olympics, than staying where he was."

The second conversation convinced Mr. Doctoroff to meet with Mr. Bloomberg at his transition office on West 56th Street.

"I thought it was a great opportunity to talk to him about the Olympics," said Mr. Doctoroff, "but over the course of an hour and a half, I decided [the deputy mayor job] was something I wanted to do."

It took Mr. Doctoroff about a month to divest himself of all financial and real estate investments that might have posed a conflict with his duties as a deputy mayor. He also successfully sought a clearance from the city's Conflicts of Interest board to remain connected to the Olympics effort.

During that time, he and the Mayor also worked out which city agencies would be reporting to Mr. Doctoroff in his position.

"We both felt strongly that all of the economic development agencies ought to be consolidated under one person," he said.

That meant Mr. Doctoroff would have domain - over the city's Economic Development Corporation, the agency tasked with attracting and retaining jobs in the city; the City Planning Department, responsible for zoning; the Housing and Preservation Department, responsible for home building; among others.

And although the development battles of Manhattan's far West Side garner most of the headlines, Mr. Doctoroff says he is most proud of his efforts across all five boroughs.

"We're executing on the mayor's comprehensive strategic plan across all five boroughs, across a wide range of industries, and a wide range of quality of life issues," he said. "It's not all about the West Side or the Olympics. It's about making New York a far more competitive place and ultimately in the long or short run generating more tax revenues for the city."

That's the question that the West Side Stadium opponents over at the New York Association for Better Choices have been asking since Nov. 12, when they opened their newspapers to find that their main financial backer, Cablevision chief executive James Dolan, had paid to publish a full-page open letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg which argued the anti-stadium case over his own swooping signature.

Now the elected officials and West Side activists who make up the association are worried that their most generous ally could be losing the battle for them. Several key stadium opponents told The Observer that their campaign is in danger of being overshadowed by the rumpled, goateed Mr. Dolan, who has apparently decided to take his case against Mayor Bloomberg mano a mano, tycoon to tycoon.

"They've gotten into a personal pissing match with each other," said State Senator Liz Krueger, a member of the New York Association for Better Choices, of Mr. Dolan and Mr. Bloomberg. "It frankly muddies the water around the facts. And the facts are strongly, in my opinion, on the side of the people opposed to the stadium deal."

Another elected official who is a member of the coalition was blunter: Mr. Dolan is "a rich guy who wakes up in the morning and is pissed and does something," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It may feel great, but it's not exactly the way to win a political battle."

Others, however, stressed the vital role that the Dolans' support has played. "It is true that M.S.G. has helped give voice to NYABC," said Whit Clay, a spokesman for the anti-stadium coalition, "but if it had not, City Hall would have steamrolled the stadium through. The Jets and the Mayor would like to confuse that support with selfish motivations, but NYABC has thousands of members and is growing. NYABC will continue to be the voice for the more than 77 percent of New Yorkers opposed to a taxpayer-subsidized football stadium."

This is among the most important battles of Mayor Bloomberg's tenure. At stake is the city's and Jets' bid for a $1.4 billion Olympic stadium, the fate of perhaps the most valuable piece of real estate in the city, and the renewal of a desolate 60-acre neighborhood-as well as the scope of Mayoral power. It's a fight that has engaged the city's entire political apparatus, with public-relations agencies, lawyers and consultants feeding eagerly at the rich troughs offered by Mr. Dolan and his father Charles on the one side, and by the New York Jets and their labor-union allies on the other.

The two sides' strategies had appeared clear: The anti-stadium forces raised questions about the use of $600 million from the city's capital coffers, while Mr. Bloomberg attacked the motives of stadium opponents, and dismissed NYABC as an Astroturf product of Dolan money and the Dolans' desire to protect the value of Madison Square Garden. Depending on whose vision you buy, NYABC is either a small local group standing up for its neighborhood and for fiscal responsibility, or it's a distraction in the war between a visionary Mayor and a pair of the city's least popular millionaires-men who have thrived on city tax breaks while they (as the litany goes) raised cable rates, blocked Yankees games from Cablevision, and led their two teams, the Knicks and the Rangers, from ignominy to ignominy at ever-higher ticket prices.

"It's smart for the Mayor to make it about the Dolans and about Cablevision and about the money they've made over the years in public subsidies," said Jonathan Bowles, the research director of the Center for an Urban Future, a city think tank that has been critical of the stadium plan.

"The Dolans have totally fallen into it," said another stadium opponent of Mr. Bloomberg's personally combative approach. "They've taken the bait."

Not to say that this is just a matter of tactics. The battle is also personal, a political feud within the small world of New York's ultra-rich. Mr. Bloomberg and the Dolans were once allies, working together on the city's bid for the Republican National Convention at the Dolans' Madison Square Garden. Last March, Mr. Bloomberg was offering his heartfelt thanks to Mr. Dolan at a Gracie Mansion press conference, where the Mayor was a local hero for getting Cablevision and YES, the Yankee network, to agree on terms before opening day. (The deal promptly collapsed, though it was repaired by the end of the month.)

The men's wealth gives them a lot in common: James Dolan's daughter, like Mr. Bloomberg's, is a top equestrienne, for example. But people close to the Mayor say that he has nothing but scorn for a money-losing cable giant that seems creaky in comparison to his own nimble financial-services company.

"It's hard to imagine the Mayor having a lot of respect for him on any level," said an aide to Mr. Bloomberg. "Dolan inherited his wealth and then made a mess of the family company. And to make things worse, he is the opposite of a good corporate citizen."

This is the public-relations battle Mr. Bloomberg would like to fight. But the conflict didn't start out on these terms. This spring, stadium opponents seemed to have claimed the high ground of policy and public priorities.

The Mayor's first foray appeared in print March 29.

"The biggest guys that are making a fuss here are, plain and simple, Cablevision-the Dolans," Mr. Bloomberg told Newsday. "It is an outrage that you let your own personal economics, or economic interests, stop a major project in this city."

The Dolans declined to comment for that story. But they were readying a response. On May 25, the broad set of anti-stadium elected officials, activists and business interests formed NYABC; one day later, the association announced the launch of an ad campaign that questioned the wisdom of the project's $600 million public subsidy at a time when the city is scrimping on basic services. Coalition member Cablevision bankrolled nearly the entire ad buy.

This fact did not escape the attention of Mr. Bloomberg, who immediately framed the entire debate as "Cablevision and the Dolans versus the public interest," telling reporters: "In order to protect their own commercial interest, [Cablevision] is trying to stop jobs from coming to this city."

The Dolans went on to decline all interview requests, ignoring the Mayor's taunts. The Jets, for their part, launched their first advertising blitz on June 2, with two TV ads focusing on the project's job-creating and environmentally friendly aspects. Although those ads didn't mention Cablevision, it was only nine days before the team launched another volley of ads that did: On June 11, a TV narrator intoned, in reference to NYABC's ads, "Who's behind these misleading ads? Cablevision, owners of Madison Square Garden. They'll do anything to block a new sports and convention center."

The Jets cast NYABC as a front for the publicly despised Cablevision. But while the campaign had some of the hallmarks of those now-familiar, corporate-sponsored phony coalitions that pop up periodically to express their love for the insurance industry, this coalition was made up of virtually every elected official whose district includes the proposed stadium site-roughly Eleventh Avenue and 30th Street. They were joined by nearly every "good government" watchdog and urban-planning group in the city-an assemblage that would have been drastically more difficult for the Jets to paint as being greedy and self-interested.

The Dolans silently put up the money, and their allies made their case for them.

"All Cablevision has done is allowed them to fight a fair fight," said Jeremy Soffin, the director of public affairs for the Regional Plan Association, which opposes the stadium but hasn't joined any formal coalitions.

Anna Levin, the vice chairwoman of Community Board 4 and an NYABC coalition member, concurred. "My view from the inside is that the Mayor is trying to turn this into something about Cablevision, but in fact we and Cablevision have developed a quite productive, if a little messy-around-the-edges, way of working together. Of course they have their own personal interests, but so do we all. They have been able to give us the resources to reach a broader audience that has advanced the public debate on all this."

And for a while, the stadium opponents seemed to be winning. A Quinnipiac University poll on June 10 found that voters opposed using tax dollars to fund the stadium by 51 to 41 percent.

Ads from both sides continued to course through the airwaves throughout July, and on July 21 the pro-stadium forces had reason to cheer: A new Quinnipiac poll found that voters approved the use of public funds for the stadium by 51 to 41 percent, as long as the project paid for itself-a question that the earlier poll didn't ask.

A few weeks later, anti-stadium coalition members started to worry about their communications strategy, said people close to the group. Their first ads, focused on competing priorities, had been produced by David Axelrod, the Chicago-based ad man who had played a key role on the smooth campaigns of Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards and Senator-elect Barack Obama. But with James Dolan taking a hands-on approach to the media message, in early August NYABC hired Arthur Finkelstein, Governor George Pataki's talented media hit man, to produce the anti-stadium commercials. One of his first spots claimed that the stadium and the Mayor's West Side project would produce air pollution and some seven million gallons of raw sewage and wastewater every day. The New York Times, in a criticism of the ad, chipped away at the stadium opponents' moral high ground, saying the ad "breathlessly exaggerates findings in the city's recent environmental impact statement on the proposed redevelopment of the West Side by conflating the stadium itself with a surrounding project that involves 28 million square feet of office space and 12,000 apartments."

An anti-stadium coalition member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, conceded that the ad "hurt our credibility."

Both sides' advertising campaigns continued to evolve through the next month. The Jets launched their biggest buy yet at the end of September, with a series of ads peopled with local residents, elected officials and even former Mayor Ed Koch-almost all of which continued to take swipes at Cablevision. By the end of October, both sides had spent a total of $11.5 million, according to the watchdog group Common Cause, with about $8.2 million of that sum coming from Cablevision.

Over the last two weeks, NYABC's tactics have turned toward ad hominem attacks on Mr. Bloomberg himself. One ad uses the Mayor's own comments from a radio interview bemoaning the city's budget crisis, and juxtaposes them with his insistence on spending $600 million in public funds on the stadium. The other ad shows Mr. Bloomberg as a boxer, squaring off against an image of himself. "It's Bloomberg versus Bloomberg!" the announcer calls out.

The Dolans' pique, to this point, had appeared only in their increasingly combative television spots. But on Nov. 9, Mr. Bloomberg drew the Dolans out from behind their coalition. He blamed the Knicks' poor start this year on the Dolans' decision to funnel so much money into anti-stadium ads. This prompted the normally press-shy family to go on the attack publicly for the first time.

"The Mayor is trying to hide a flawed and financially risky plan by taking cheap shots at Madison Square Garden," M.S.G. chairman James Dolan told reporters. "He talks about debt as if it is free money, but city taxpayers will be forced to pay his hefty stadium bill."

Three days later, without warning his allies, Mr. Dolan stepped out from underneath the umbrella completely, running the full-page ad in all the major daily newspapers in the form of an open letter to Mr. Bloomberg. "It is time to set the record straight on the position of Madison Square Garden regarding the proposed West Side Stadium," the letter began. It listed the policy objections to the project, ranging from the question of priorities to the timing of the project in relation to the Olympics, but stadium opponents and backers alike noticed two things: the Madison Square Garden letterhead at the top and Mr. Dolan's signature at the bottom.

The fight, the anti-stadium campaigners noted with alarm, had shifted to Mr. Bloomberg's intensely personal turf, where he represents the public interest and Mr. Dolan represents nobody but himself. The Mayor appears to be relishing the turn. He adopted his most combative stance yet in his weekly radio address on Nov. 14, calling on Cablevision and the Dolans to "stop the lies."

"They are lying to New Yorkers and trying to end their Olympic dreams," Mr. Bloomberg said.

The Dolans responded swiftly-and once again without consulting their allies. Their spokesman called for bringing the stadium question to a referendum. But even their allies, like Assemblyman Richard Gotfried, told The Observer that they doubted a referendum is legally possible, though other forms of legislative review might be. The Mayor's spokesman, Ed Skyler, sarcastically dismissed the idea out of hand.

"It's an excellent idea," he said. "We should ask the following question: Should we reward the cable company that charges the highest subscriber rates in the country, took the Yankees off the air and is trying to do the same to the Mets, has run the Knicks and Rangers into the ground, and now wants to end our chances at hosting the Olympics, by changing the City Charter to protect their monopoly?"

It sounded good: Who could be against turning derelict rail yards into parks?

Indeed, as the Jets refined their pitch after that first ad in early June, they began to talk more and more about the pedestrian-friendly aspects of the project: parks to the north and south, a tunnel affording passage to the nearby Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and a wide, landscaped platform over Route 9A connecting the stadium to the water. Every image of the stadium on the Jets' Web site shows this idealized version of the stadium, seamlessly integrated with its surroundings by means of this landscaped web of connective tissue.

There's only one problem with this rendition: None of it is budgeted to happen. The parks, tunnel and platform do not appear in the General Project Plan that the Jets, the city and the state just certified and sent out for public review.

And if those amenities are to be built, the public will most likely have to shoulder the majority of the costs, which would push the project's subsidy from $600 million, where it currently stands, to at least $700 million, according to documents from the Javits Center obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and made available to The Observer by a third party who opposes the stadium project.

The documents show:

· The park proposed for the north side of the stadium-in addition to the ground beneath it, where the pedestrian tunnel is slotted to be built-are both owned by the Javits Center. One might assume, especially given the degree of importance that the Jets and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have assigned to these amenities, that the tunnel and the park would be part of the stadium's budget. The General Project Plan, however, doesn't make any provision for either, which means that the choice (or the responsibility) to do them falls by default to the Javits Center. Of course, the city and the state jointly pay the Javits Center's construction bills, so that constitutes a subsidy regardless of whether the accountants write the line item into the Javits Center's or the stadium's budget. Internal documents from the Javits Center Operating Corporation peg the tunnel's cost at $30 million; estimates for the narrow park were not available.

· The Jets have pledged to shoulder half the costs of a new ferry terminal at 39th Street, to serve the team's New Jersey fan base. That leaves the city and state to cover the other half. While this is not a subsidy, strictly speaking-the ferry terminal is off the footprint of the stadium development and therefore considered a separate project-the need for the new ferry terminal is created as a direct result of the Jets' plan to forego building a parking facility for the stadium. The idea is to encourage the use of public transportation to and from the stadium-but for Jersey fans, that means building additional infrastructure.

Not that the Jets are walking away from all their commitments to incorporate neighborhood-friendly design into the stadium project. The General Project Plan describes a two-level "game porch," to be constructed on the bed of 33rd Street north of the stadium, just south of the site of the proposed northern park. The first floor will contain a museum and meeting rooms; as The Observer reported in March, interest has already been generated in establishing a Science of Sport museum on the site. The second floor leads to the stadium's main northern entrance. The porch continues over Route 9A, along the width of the stadium and beyond, to form a pedestrian bridge that is perhaps one quarter the width of the hypothetical platform slotted to run down the stadium's western edge. The cost of the porch-this time borne by the Jets-will push construction costs for the stadium from the originally planned $800 million to at least $875 million.

· The Jets still haven't worked out how much they will give in annual lease payments to the M.T.A., which owns the rail yards. In recent weeks, M.T.A. chairman Peter Kalikow has been saying publicly that the rail yards could fetch anywhere from $400 million to $1 billion on the open market. If the city and the state force the M.T.A. into accepting a below-market lease from the Jets, it could drastically hurt the bottom line of the already cash-strapped agency. And since taxpayers pay a good chunk of the M.T.A.'s bills, a forced fire sale of the agency's property seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul. How much this could cost taxpayers is impossible to calculate without first publicly bidding the air rights out, but the Jets have given no indication that they will be paying anything near what Mr. Kalikow has said is a fair market price. And all this as Mayor Bloomberg takes the agency to task for being fiscally reckless-while at the same time arguing that it should sell its most valuable real-estate asset at a steep discount to billionaire Jets owner Woody Johnson.

· The Jets plan to float at least $400 million in bonds to finance the stadium's construction. However, according to the General Project Plan, those bonds are tax-exempt, meaning that the city won't be able to collect income tax on the interest that people or institutions collect from the bonds. Independent economic experts say the lost tax revenue could easily total $50 million over the course of a 30-year bond.

· As the stadium will be located on state-owned land, the Jets will pay no real-estate taxes. Rather, according to the General Project Plan, they will be making so-called real-estate payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT's) to the city, which will then funnel the money back to the Jets to cover their debt service on their bonds. In other words, the Jets will be taking money out of one pocket and putting it back in another-and the public gets no cut. Of course, the Jets will be generating sales, income and other taxes out of the stadium and related convention-center activities, but so would any other development project that would rise on that spot. The difference is that another development project might also be paying real-estate PILOT's to the city without the expectation of then getting that money funneled back. Again, without bidding that property out on the open market, the opportunity cost isn't calculable.

And the new stuff becomes the old, and it all goes the same place: the beloved brass spittoons and green eye shades along with the poker games and publisher's mistresses, along even with the hideous orange rug of the late 70's-in capital letters, the Hideous Orange Rug, despised symbol of an era of its own. "It was a quite awful burnt orange," said columnist Joyce Purnick.

Not even The Times itself can avoid the passage into Times Building lore. On Monday, the New York Times Company announced that it had found a buyer for 229 East 43rd Street, which it has occupied in some form for 91 years. A partnership led by Tishman Speyer Properties is set to buy the building for $175 million, with a plan to convert it to a mix of retail and deluxe offices. By year's end, The Times will be a mere tenant in its former domain, renting the space back from the new owner until sometime in 2007, when the newspaper's planned futuristic Eighth Avenue headquarters is supposed to be ready.

The landlord on 43rd Street will be a $300 million investment fund headed by Tishman Speyer, in partnership with the New York City Employees' Retirement System and the Teachers' Retirement System. Each of the three parties contributed $100 million to the partnership, but Tishman has control over its real-estate acquisitions. Rob Speyer, senior managing director of Tishman Speyer, said he swooped on the Times Building because of its "great bones": multiple floors of high ceilings, huge windows and relatively large floor plates.

After The Times vacates, Mr. Speyer said his company will commence a "top-to-bottom renovation," turning the interior into class-A office space with new HVAC and electrical systems, a new lobby and a new elevator.

"It has the advantage of its majestic façade as well as the history of The Times , and we're going to leverage that in our repositioning of the building," Mr. Speyer said.

Emptying out the Times Building-to say nothing of leveraging its past-is less a job for investors and contractors than for some sort of psycho-archeologist, partnered with an industrial historian. It is not even one building, exactly, but four separate pieces by four different architects. The first part was built in 1913, and an addition followed in each succeeding decade: 1924, 1931 and 1947.

There is something inherently involuted about the place. "It's a funny building, you know, because you can't see it," said Andrew Rosenthal, deputy editoral-page editor and son of former executive editor Abe Rosenthal. It is so engulfed by its surroundings, Mr. Rosenthal said, that it was an event when the Hilton Times Square opened its Above Restaurant nearby. The restaurant, Mr. Rosenthal said, is "the only place, except the roof of the Port Authority, that you can actually see the New York Times Building."

Mr. Rosenthal himself is all too familiar with what the place looks like. His father, he recalled, installed a painting of the Times Building in the vestibule outside the family apartment, by the elevator doors, where he had to look at it coming and going every day. The elder Mr. Rosenthal's taste in decoration used to frighten the clerks who dropped off freshly printed newspapers on the doorstep, his son said.

"But it was sentiment, not megalomania," Mr. Rosenthal said. His father, he said, was "completely in love with the newspaper."

Other Times employees' relationships with the building and its various evolutions are a mixture of love and hate-to say nothing of fear, nostalgia, gossipiness and pride.

"The reality is, it was never a wonderful place to work," said Paul Goldberger, the former Times architecture critic now with The New Yorker . It combined, he said, "the worst qualities of a factory and an office …. It felt tired, worn out, somewhat dirty."

Mr. Rosenthal described the building's various partial renovations, up until its full overhaul in 1997, as "progressively more and more oppressive, until everybody couldn't stand it anymore."

But everyone's tastes, and memories, are a bit different. Columnist Maureen Dowd remembers the oppressiveness fondly. "Fear can be a very useful thing in a newspaper," Ms. Dowd said. Since the 1997 renovation broke up the open newsroom dominated by editors' eyes, Ms. Dowd said, "I get completely lost whenever I go there now. I always want to leave bread crumbs."

Everyone has his or her own lost Times . Notably, there's The Times of Arthur Gelb, the retired managing editor, who embarked on the paperback tour for his memoir, City Room , the day after the sale was announced. In Mr. Gelb's account of being a copy boy in the wooden-desk era, a pair of bookies kept a desk in the office. One editor would drink his way through a night's work, lining up empties on his desk and sometimes falling out of his chair drunk. Mr. Gelb and his fellows would spy on chorus girls in their theater dressing room across an alley.

But the dressing room-and the theater-were demolished for the sake of the paper's 1947 expansion. As the paper grew, the raffishness waned; for Ms. Dowd's generation, Mr. Gelb's revelations were an astonishment. Ms. Dowd said she had assumed " The Times was always stuffy and stuffier in the old days." By the time she got to the professionalizing paper, she said, "They didn't even drink on Election Night."

But probity hardly arrived all at once. Another tale from Mr. Gelb, this one not in the book: In the third-floor morgue, there was "a little hideaway office," reputed to have been built in the 1930's so a managing editor could tryst with a Met singer there. Decades later, Mr. Gelb said, Abe Rosenthal, as managing editor, went to the morgue looking for a quiet place to write. "He opened the door," Mr. Gelb said. "There were two reporters there making out. The reporter, whose name I won't tell you, said, 'Oh, Abe, is there anything I could do for you?'"

"So sex was not bad at The Times ," Mr. Gelb said.

Gay Talese, a young star reporter for Gelb in the 50's, echoed Mr. Gelb's memory of a sex-soaked headquarters. The building, he said, "personalized for me the hypocrisy and the virtue of the city. The virtue in the sense that, each day, The Times would distribute throughout the city, and the nation, a kind of attitude about standards. They would be an advocate for standards, for political standards, for foreign-policy standards, and within the building, none of this was going on. Within the building, everyone was smoking, while virtue was advocated in the sheets of the Gray Lady. The building was rampant with sexuality."

The double standard extended to the decorating sensibilities. When the orange carpet came in and the metal desks went out, Mr. Goldberger said he wrote a piece for another publication-"some magazine that doesn't exist anymore"-condemning the new décor, which Mr. Goldberger remembered as "a sea of fake-wood Formica."

"It looked a sort of middle-level insurance office," Mr. Goldberger said. "It lost all of the energy and power of the old newsroom."

To Mr. Goldberger, who championed good taste and high standards in his own writings, his paper's décor was cause for dismay. "I used to say that my influence began at the front of the building and expanded outwards, but never inwards," he said.

In some sense, it was testimony to a perfect firewall between the writers and the ownership. But over the years, The Times began to listen to its own pronouncements, chipping away at the orange and brown-till finally, with the 1997 renovation, it emerged as an institution bent on high sensibilities inside and out.

The place is "quite nice-looking now," Mr. Rosenthal said.

Some minor events on the road to tastefulness assumed a life of their own. Sometime around the ascendancy of Max Frankel as executive editor, the long wall along 44th Street, where the editors sat, was repainted blue-a nice blue, Mr. Goldberger said, "medium, slightly grayish blue." In response to the decorating move, the staff came to call the top editors the "blue wall," a piece of Times culture that lasted as long as the paint did. But not longer.

Other details did last. During the Vietnam era, standards editor Al Siegal recalled, a graffito appeared inside the elevator that top editor Clifton Daniel would ride to the composing room each night: "Mr. Daniel, please end the war." The Times painted over the message, Mr. Siegal said, and it reappeared shortly. "It appeared and disappeared 20 times," Mr. Siegal said, "and then finally The Times stopped painting over it."

Despite all such legends, the newsroom was not the true defining feature of the Times Building. That distinction belonged to the printing plant, which departed for a separate facility in Queens in 1997. "The newsroom was the newsroom," Mr. Rosenthal said. "It was where my father worked, and later where I worked."

In its prime, Mr. Goldberger said, the Times Building "was a vertically integrated manufacturing facility, basically. Rolls of paper came in one end and newspapers came out the other and everything was done there."

It was the press plant that made the magic possible-that allowed a reporter to pull a story out of a typewriter and follow it, floor to floor, till it was on hot pages with wet ink an hour later.

When the copy desk pasted stories together by hand, Mr. Siegal said, it used paste taken from the barrels in the basement-the same paste that held the ends of newsprint rolls together. The smell of the building, he said, was the smell of manufacturing: a mix of molten lead and toasted papier-mâché.

The smells lingered for a while after the printers moved to Queens, Mr. Siegal said, and then faded. Now, the platform-agnostic information-delivery system that is The Times is headed to a clean, professional future on Eighth Avenue. It no longer needs industrial-strength floors to support the machinery, any more than it needs burlesque girls or all-night poker games.

According to Times vice president of real estate David Thurm, the new Times building-a lattice-encased Renzo Piano tower that will rise to 1,142 feet at its mast-topped tip-will have an interior designed to reflect the company's "Rules of the Road" (e.g., "Treat each other with honesty, respect and civility"). The Gensler architectural firm is putting private offices toward the core of the building, so that workers in the open floor plan get the benefit of the windows, somewhat collapsing the hierarchy normally inscribed in office floor plans. Ceilings are extra-high, Mr. Thurm said, "for a much nicer and friendlier work environment."

And the building will be headed toward its own separate future. In early 2001, while in discussions with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission about protected landmark status for the building, The Times sought and gained permission to convert the first- and basement-floor truck loading docks into retail-ready space, suitable for big-box stores such as Home Depot or Target. The two floors, both of which have 20-foot ceilings, total some 100,000 square feet.

"Very few places in Manhattan are zoned for big-box," said Mr. Speyer, the new owner, "and there are none in the middle of the Times Square area. We're expecting there to be great demand for it."

The challenge comes in the wake of unsuccessful efforts by City Council member Letitia James of Brooklyn to obtain a copy of the agreement the city is making with the International Olympics Committee to enter the final round of bidding to host the Games in 2012.

On Oct. 22, Ms. James sent a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg asking for a copy of the agreement. It is still unanswered, even though the city has to deliver its agreement to the I.O.C. by Nov. 15.

It's important because, as several Olympics veterans have noted, these agreements usually require the city government to agree to handle any financial obligations the private bid committee cannot itself deliver.

Daniel Doctoroff, the founder and former head of the city's Olympic bid committee, NYC2012, turned the bid company into a favorite charity of then-private billionaire financial-media mogul Michael Bloomberg; now he serves the latter as deputy mayor for economic development. According to Mr. Miller's office, cutting the City Council out of negotiations about a financial commitment to the Olympics is illegal.

"If some or all of the financial burden is going to be put on the city, that needs an open public review in front of the city's elected legislature," said Steve Sigmund, Mr. Miller's communications director.

NYC2012 has said publicly that the Games would be privately financed, and that taxpayers are only on the hook for a worst-case scenario backstop of $250 million, which was approved by the State Legislature in 2001.

But the 1998 City Council resolution that authorized NYC2012 to seek the Summer Games on behalf of the city concluded by stating, "No contractual or financial obligation related to [the Olympics] shall be accepted or assumed by or on behalf of the City of New York without subsequent, express authorization by the Council of the City of New York."

'"We're very supportive of bringing the Olympics to New York," said Mr. Sigmund, "[But] we think the resolution makes clear that we should see the Host City Contract [first]."

New York is among five cities competing to host the 2012 Summer Games. The deadline for each city to submit its final bid application is Nov. 15, and the I.O.C. will announce a winner on July 5, 2005. As part of that Nov. 15 application, however, each applicant city must pledge to sign an "Undertaking" document, in which the city pledges to sign the Host City Contract "without reserve or amendment," should it be awarded the Games in July. In other words, New York will be effectively locked into the terms of the Host City Contract as soon as its signs the Undertaking on Nov. 15.

Ambitious plans attend the city's Olympics bid: a $1.4 billion Olympic stadium, a $1.6 billion Olympic Village and a $600 million International Broadcast Center.

How much of that development the city commits itself to in the Nov. 15 contract is unclear. And since NYC2012 has refused to publicly disclose the terms of that contract, the question remains: Who exactly bears ultimate financial responsibility for the staging and organization of the Games?

Mr. Doctoroff has said that the burden will fall on the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG), a private entity that will shield taxpayers from financial liabilities.

History, however, suggests that it may be otherwise. In four of the last five Olympic Host City Contracts-Beijing's contract was unavailable-nearly identical clauses put the financial responsibility for the Games at least partly on the host city itself.

"Financial responsibility for the planning, organization and staging of the Games," each of the contracts read, "shall be entirely assumed, jointly and severally, by the City and the OCOG."

This liability was so great-potentially billions of dollars in cost overruns-that two of the host cities had to get their state or provincial governments to assume the burden from the cities' shoulders. In the case of the 2002 Winter Games, the state of Utah signed a contract indemnifying Salt Lake City from Olympics cost overruns. No limit was placed on the amount the state would cover. In the case of the 2010 Winter Games, the province of British Columbia signed a contract indemnifying Vancouver from cost overruns-again, the indemnification was unlimited.

"In 2001 the state legislature approved a $250 million guarantee fund as part of the city's Olympic bid," 2012 spokesman Jay Carson told The Observer . But the limit is worrying some public officials, since there is nobody besides the city to take on losses in excess of $250 million.

In fact, all recent Olympics Games, he said, have turned profits, so the $250 million is likely to cover the costs.

"The facts on this issue are clear and public, and have been so since the beginning," he said. With five days to go before NYC2012 signs its undertaking, however, some are getting jittery.

"NYC2012 is basically saying, 'Trust us,' and they've shown that we can't,' said Brian Hatch, a former deputy mayor of Salt Lake City who oversaw part of that city's buildup for the 2002 Winter Games, and who has become a fierce critic of building an Olympic stadium on the West Side. "They haven't been up-front with the City Council by letting them know that the city has to assume unlimited liability and complete responsibility for the Games. So 'trust us' is an unacceptable answer."

Mr. Doctoroff did not respond to interview requests to resolve this issue. However, he has long argued that neither the city's nor the state's taxpayers are liable for cost overruns stemming from the Games.

"Under no circumstances is the city or state on the hook," with the exception of the State Legislature's $250 million contingency fund, Mr. Doctoroff told The Observer last month.

NYC2012 projects that the Olympics will cost $3.7 billion-around $1 billion for capital costs-venue construction-and the remainder for operating expenses, the actual running of the Games. When Mr. Doctoroff says that the Games will be "privately financed," he means that the $3.7 billion will come solely from Olympics-generated revenues like TV rights, tickets and corporate sponsorships. Mr. Doctoroff said that his staff has done incredibly detailed budgeting for each aspect of the two-week event. Each proposed new venue has a contingency fund in its construction budget, and the overall budget includes a $200 million general-purpose contingency-in addition to the $250 million contingency from the State Legislature.

The $3.7 billion budget does not include the price tag of billions of dollars in capital projects that are essential to the Games, but which remain "off-budget" because Mr. Doctoroff claims that they are such good ideas that the city would pursue them even apart from the Games.

And with the exception of a $600 million public subsidy for the stadium, NYC2012 expects the private sector to pay for all these projects-like the stadium, village and broadcasting center-because they are intended to house commercial, residential and sports-team tenants long after the Olympics. Mr. Hatch, the former Salt Lake City deputy mayor, scoffed at the idea.

"If private developers don't step up to pay for these projects, the city's taxpayers will be on the hook."

By half the auditorium.

Nevertheless, for a good 20 seconds at A. Philip Randolph High School in Harlem on Oct. 19, the boos resounded equally with the cheers, while Mr. Bloomberg maintained a half-embarrassed smile until the din subsided.

The Mayor was sharing the stage that day with some three dozen American Olympians and Paralympians, who had descended en masse upon the high school to receive a hero’s welcome in honor of their achievements at the Summer Games in Athens. The event also served as a pep rally for bringing the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York. And although it’s anyone’s guess why Mr. Bloomberg proved to be so unpopular among many of the students, it was hard not to see the jeers as a referendum on his campaign to bring the Olympics to the city.

After all, some critics are questioning the Mayor’s assurances that the games will be privately financed, and that the city’s taxpayers will be completely insulated from billions of dollars in cost overruns which may stem from the Games. Brian Hatch, a former deputy mayor of Salt Lake City who oversaw part of that city’s buildup for the 2002 Winter Games and who has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of building an Olympic stadium on the West Side, dismisses the notion that taxpayers won’t get stuck with bills.

"The Games are awarded to a city, and the city is going to be ultimately responsible for the costs," he said.

Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, the founder of the New York’s Olympic bid, strenuously argues the opposite.

"Under no circumstances," he said, "is the city or state on the hook," with the exception of a $250 million contingency fund approved by the State Legislature in 2001.

Mr. Doctoroff’s comments notwithstanding, the city’s bid committee, NYC2012, has refused The Observer ’s repeated requests to verify Mr. Doctoroff’s claims by examining a draft of the contract which the city will sign with the International Olympic Committee in July, should New York be awarded the Games. A Mayoral spokesperson said the document couldn’t be released because it has not been finalized.

"The City Council should be able to let lawyers look at this to make sure it’s airtight," said Mr. Hatch. "Are there hidden costs? How will the City Council know for sure unless they let lawyers look at it?"

There is reason to doubt the administration’s claims about taxpayer insulation from cost overruns. Before the I.O.C. awarded the 2002 Games to Salt Lake City, and the 2010 Winter Games to Vancouver, Canada, each city had to sign contracts spelling out that the "responsibility for the organization and staging of the Games … shall be entirely assumed, jointly and severally, by the City and the [local organizing committee]." Moreover, those liabilities were so large that the cities couldn’t take them on by themselves, and both Utah and British Columbia had to step in and pledge their own state and provincial coffers against the potential overruns.

Mr. Doctoroff maintains that that won’t be the case with New York’s bid. Rather than the public being on the hook for overruns, he said, that responsibility will fall to the Organizing Committee of the Games (OCOG), a private entity that the city will create if it gets the Games.

"The OCOG is undertaking to fulfill the requirements with respect to the [potential cost overruns]," Mr. Doctoroff said. "There are certain things the city will do—pick up the trash, clean the streets—but there is no financial commitment by the city for the Olympic Games."

There is no way to verify that claim, however, without seeing a copy of the 2012 Host City Contract. And what’s more, Mr. Bloomberg plans to commit to this contract long before the I.O.C. makes it final decision in July. On Nov. 15, when the city will submit its formal bid application to the I.O.C., the Mayor must sign his name to an "undertaking" document, in which he pledges to sign the Host City Contact "without reserve or amendment" should the city win the competition for the 2012 Games. In other words, the city will be effectively locked into the Host City Contract, which might be tantamount to accepting financial liabilities stemming from the Games.

NYC2012 has budgeted the Olympics at $3.7 billion. About $1 billion would go toward capital costs—the construction of some venues. The remaining $2.7 billion would go toward operating costs—the actual running of the games. Most of that money will be secured by TV rights, tickets and corporate sponsorships. Mr. Doctoroff said he and NYC2012 have done "remarkably detailed" budgeting for each aspect of the two-week event. Each budgeted venue has a contingency in its construction budget, and the overall budget includes a $200 million general-purpose contingency—in addition to the $250 million contingency from the State Legislature.

Mr. Doctoroff contrasted New York’s plan for financing the games with that of Athens, whose government is heavily in debt as a result of infrastructure improvements made for the Games.

"It’s comparing a completely different model," he said. "The government ran the Games. The government made all sorts of decisions to add additional costs on. So they were responsible, and they picked up the costs."

Other Costs

Although it might seem that New York’s $3.7 billion budget is propped up by sound revenue streams and relatively solid contingencies and public guarantees, the $3.7 billion is not the whole story. That figure does not include several billion dollars worth of capital projects that Mr. Doctoroff calls essential to the games, but which don’t appear in the budget because, he says, they are worthwhile and would be pursued even if New York doesn’t win the Games.

These projects include the $1.4 billion Olympic stadium, the $1.6 billion Olympic village and the $600 million International Broadcast Center, among others.

Although cities vying for the Olympic Games have long been using that logic to push for infrastructure improvements that have otherwise proved impossible to get off the ground, the tactic has no shortage of critics. Mr. Hatch, the former Salt Lake City deputy mayor, called Mr. Doctoroff’s logic disingenuous. If the stadium, the village and the broadcast centers are necessary to the Games, he argues, then it is irrelevant that the city thinks they’re good ideas on their own. The city is counting on the private sector to pay the lion’s share of each of those three projects, but if private funding sources don’t materialize, Mr. Hatch argues, the city will have no choice but to spend public moneys on the projects.

"They’re either necessary for the Games or they’re not," Mr. Hatch said. "You can’t claim that they’re necessary to get them going, but then claim that they don’t factor into the cost of the games once they’re started."

At the post-event press conference at Rudolph High, both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Doctoroff acknowledged the city is counting on private investment for each of those three massive projects, as well as many other smaller facilities.

So, the question remains.

"Who is going to be left holding the bag if private developers don’t step up to build these projects?" asked Mr. Hatch.

Mr. Freeman just wanted to get home. "Let’s get out of here," he told his buddy, a elderly man in a loose gray suit. "Hey, Mickey—why didn’t you get your piece of the Donald?" The former TV actor muttered, "Ah, he’s too easy to roast," before shuffling across the room.

The chance to turn Mr. Trump, that ultimate New York character—billionaire, skirt-chaser, blowhard, TV phenomenon—into a human piñata for a bunch of sour standup comics might seem too easy, too natural, too perfect. But all too tempting (who wouldn’t want their chance to take a shot at Mr. "You’re Fired"?). So, after a lunch of baked chicken, broccoli and scalloped potatoes, washed down with Johnnie Walker Black Label and Trump Ice spring water, some professional comics and a few amateurs (Al Sharpton, Regis Philbin, Jeff Zucker) took their whacks at the man and his mane.

"I like your hair—it looks like Nicole Kidman’s bush," snapped Stewie Stone, an old-school comic in a rumpled gray suit, veering to glare at Mr. Trump, who sat at the dais, a beatific grin on his face. "Do you realize if your father weren’t [a millionaire] first, you’d be a fucking waiter at this event?"

Mr. Stone set the agenda for the roast, which consisted of grilling Mr. Trump for his real-estate tactics, his taste in women such as current girlfriend Melania Knauss and, of course, his hair.

The man of the hour, orange hair glinting in the light, pink tie anchoring his suit, reserved his biggest laugh for Norm Crosby’s joke about buffalo ejaculate making the ground sticky. Most of the time, he flashed that bland smile ("On the show, in the boardroom, you’ve got that pursed-lips thing," cracked Susie Essman. "It looks a little like a vagina. And that might be a good thing, because this way when you’re sucking [NBC chief] Jeff Zucker’s cock, you’ll both be playing it straight.")

Mr. Zucker, Mr. Trump’s boss as the mastermind behind The Apprentice, guffawed, his bald head bobbing up and down, reflecting the house lights, as he elbowed Katie Couric, who was seated next to him. (Later, he got his own chance, reading from scripted notes: "Donald’s wedding will have something for everyone—for Donald and his friends, there will be a cigar room. For Melania and her friends, a bouncy castle.")

When Mr. Stone deadpanned, "I read your new book—it only goes up to Chapter 11," fellow comedian Jeffrey Ross banged his fist on the table in frustration, mouthing the words "That was mine!" A mile away, at the far end of the 75-strong dais, sat a grinning Tom Cantone, the vice president at Foxwoods Resort and one of Mr. Trump’s rivals.

Mr. Trump’s smile faded when Mr. Stone cracked, "The last person who changed the skyline of a city so much was Hermann Goering," emphasizing over the tepid applause, " … who was a Nazi."

A hush came over the room. The audience, including two bottle-blond young women sitting up front, tucked into their cheesecake. Victoria Gotti, in a tight black top, snoozed, resting her chin in her palm.

Grim-faced Richard Belzer went even further as he promised to "take a closer look at the man, the legend, the fucking grafter wrapped in a fraud perpetrated on society known as Donald Trump." After cursing the audience for hissing at one of his jokes, he proceeded to evaluate some of Mr. Trump’s famous sayings, as popularized in his books. "Here’s a quote from Donald J. Trump: ‘Money was never a big motivation, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.’ Wait a minute—I thought the real excitement was evicting a crippled orphan just before the bulldozer shows up."

But Mr. Trump barely dropped his smile, and with reason. At this point, the ritual verged on the ridiculous, a strange little game in which the peasants get to poke fun at the king once a year, emphasizing all the more who wields the power. And Mr. Trump knew it, playing along with that plastic grin.

Al Sharpton, who looked catatonic throughout most of the coarse humor, even got into the act. "The Friars Club needs sensitivity training. We could start with the guy who called me up to come to this roast. I said, ‘How diverse will the audience be?’ He said, ‘Oh, that won’t be a problem. We’ll have as many blacks there as Donald has living in his buildings.’"

An orange-suited elderly man sitting at a table in the front grabbed Ben Stiller: "Pinch my cheeks—do you feel that?" Mr. Stiller obliged him, slinking away to greet his father and past honoree, Jerry Stiller.

A large man stretched into a tuxedo, his brown beard crowding his chin, almost fell out of his chair, teetering on the edge, as Ms. Essman took her turn at the dais, thanking Mr. Philbin for his introduction, "Thank you, Rege. I had no idea you had such a sharp tongue. It must severely hurt Mike Eisner’s ass." (Mr. Eisner is the chairman of Disney.)

Ms. Essman, better known as Jeff’s wife on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, was on a roll, telling Trump: "We met once, but you don’t remember because you weren’t trying to sleep with me. That’s ’cause I’m not your type. It’s O.K.—because, you know, I’m smart, my tits are real, and I speak English." Mr. Trump looked into the audience and smiled reassuringly at Ms. Knauss.

"I think you should make the Trump condom, and you should have your face right on the tip. That way at least someone is getting fucked by you besides your business partners …. At this point, the only thing you own that’s not going down is Melania," quipped Ms. Essman before turning her tongue on Ms. Couric, who wore a glittering silver "K" pendant on her black sweater.

"Katie Couric had been dating the owner of the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox! I mean, why don’t you just fuck Saddam Hussein?" And Mr. Sharpton: "He probably has no idea who I am. Essman is a Hebrew word for Tawana." And, of course, Bill O’Reilly: "Bill O’Reilly has a new reality-TV show on NBC. Jeff Zucker just told me it’s called The O’Reilly Fucked Her. He’s also pushing a new children’s book, it’s called When Billy Gets Big."

By the end, Mr. Trump was still grinning and in control. Getting up to thank the crowd, he apologized to Ms. Knauss; pushed Mr. Philbin aside ("You sit down," he growled); teased Ms. Couric, attending her very first roast, about the first word she’d been privileged to hear ("cunt"); and fired back at the enemies and detractors who’d been making light of his casino’s financial problems. "Now, as far as Atlantic City goes, we’re doing very well. Watch—you watch, you watch. We’ll pull rabbits out of a hat."

Someone in the audience laughed.

—Marcus Baram with Blair Golson

Buying Souls

Politics makes fellows get into strange beds. On the night of Oct. 12, about 150 young New Yorkers joined together at the Slipper Room for a singles auction to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats to federal, state and local government. It was sponsored by Girls Gone Political, which, according to a flier being distributed, is a grassroots organization that is "disgusted with the Bush Adminstration!"

Techno star Moby, who was with a beautiful and brainy blonde, said he’d do "just about anything" to get John Kerry elected.

"I mean, humiliation is my forte," he said. "I would walk backwards from New York to Washington D.C. Not naked."

"Stop having anal sex?" Musician Dolce Fino asked him.

Silence.

Would the famously vegan Moby start eating steaks?

"If the difference was between George Bush and John Kerry winning, yes, I would eat a steak," he said. "And I would probably be projectile-vomiting for the next month, but I would gladly take one for the team."

And what would it take to vote for Bush?

"I would vote for George Bush if part of his problem was allowing Manhattan to secede from New York, happily, and let the rest of the country have him."

His friends cheered.

Writer Jay McInerney, up onstage to say a few words in support of John Kerry, told a joke his precocious 9-year-old son had told him. "He said, ‘Dad, there was a journalist interviewing George Bush, and he asked George Bush the significance of Roe vs. Wade. And George Bush said, ‘Roe vs. Wade was the most significant decision that George Washington had to make before he crossed the Delaware."

Snickering laughter.

"I thought that was pretty good for a 9-year-old, and I’m very proud of my son for being against George Bush, for being a Democrat," Mr. McInerney said to more applause. "Particularly in the hotbed of Republicanism which is the private-school environment in Nashville, Tenn."

Finishing up, he said, "We know what’s happening here: We want to elect John Kerry and defeat George Bush." But asked how much money it would take to get him to vote Republican on Nov. 2, Mr. McInerney replied, "A couple of million would do it—but they’re against everything I believe." Still, he said, "I’d sell my one vote." He paused. "Two million."

It was time to auction the celebrities present for dates. Moby was sold for $800 (after agreeing to match the bid).

Kyrie Collins, wearing a tuxedo-style blouse, velvet snakeskin-print pants and pointy Jimmy Choo boots, stepped outside. One of the organizers of the event as well as an entrepreneur and a "motorcycle chick," she said she has given a lot to Kerry already.

"What else would I do? I’d pretty much walk over glass, eat dirt, pull my own hair out, rip at my breasts, run naked through the streets—whatever it took," she said.

A few nights later, on the other side of town and the political landscape, there was a literary-political salon-type gathering at William F. Buckley’s Park Avenue spread. In his plush, modern-art-filled living room, Mr. Buckley moderated a lively but pretty serious discussion on the war in Iraq and the Presidential race. While in line for the bathroom, The Transom asked Fox News correspondent Monica Crowley what she’d do to get Bush elected.

"I would give up all of my Duran Duran albums," she said. "And I just saw them last week in person, and I would still run off with any one of them. So for me to give up all my Duran Duran albums—that’s saying a lot. That’s serious. I would never listen to them again. This is a huge sacrifice. Life without ‘Come Undone’ and ‘Rio’ is not worth living, and I’m willing to give it up."

How much to get her to vote for Kerry?

"No, they would have to bust the budget for the amount of money. Inconceivable! I don’t have a price like that. For me to vote for Kerry, he’d have to become a Republican."

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru was asked what Kerry could do to buy his vote.

"I am reminded of something that I read in an Alex Cockburn column years ago about some union leader who was upset with Jimmy Carter, and he was asked, ‘What could Jimmy Carter do to make you happy?’ And he said, ‘Nothing!’ And he thought for a minute and he said, ‘Wait! Wait! One thing: die." And then he laughed.

—George Gurley

The Passion of Payne

Alexander Payne, taking a break from the hectic schedule of promoting his new movie, Sideways, is sitting on a silver bollard in front of the Time Warner Center on Oct. 15. Handsome and slender, his eyes betray more mischief than it seems he would like. He speaks and moves with determination and makes sure to be on time, if not ahead of time.

Mr. Payne’s protagonists are not made of the same stuff. Young or old, male or perhaps female; wealthy enough or just scraping by; professionally accomplished or unemployed, they all share a certain quality. From Citizen Ruth’s Ruth Stoops to Sideways’ Miles Raymond, they suffer from the same disorder: high levels of self-absorption coupled with low levels of self-awareness. They are often repellent in their dishonesty and obliviousness, the sort of small people who leave audiences laughing awkwardly in the knowledge that it is their own helpless humanity depicted onscreen. Certain critics have taken this to mean that the Stanford-educated Payne, who speaks in full paragraphs and is disarmingly self-aware, is a condescending prick, an arrogant bastard and, worst of all, pretentious.

"I make comedies!" Mr. Payne says. "So when a guy slips on a banana peel, you’re not supposed to laugh? We’re supposed to understand his pain? Give me a break! You know, I remember one negative review, written by a guy—who shall remain nameless, but whose initials were Anthony Lane—who called me pretentious! Mind you, I agree with a lot of negative reviews, but it was just so clear that this said far more about the reviewer than it said about my film. Jim and I like our characters! We think they’re funny!"

Funny, indeed—when Jack Nicholson received his 2002 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Feature, he mumbled, "Did anyone notice we were making a comedy?"

Mr. Payne has spent the last 13 years writing screenplays (and doctoring other directors’) with his best friend, Jim Taylor. Each script is hammered out on one computer with two keyboards over the course of six months, eight hours every day. "There’s a lot of noodling time and obsessive e-mail checking," but they get done on time. And so with Sideways, one set of best friends found itself writing about another. "No, the relationship is not a lot like ours—it’s a lot like the characters in the book. It’s based on a book. We’re professionals!" Mr. Payne is eager to emphasize, several times throughout a conversation, that he is a professional, and by implication that The Transom may not be.

Nevertheless, Mr. Payne is also eager to emphasize that he does not wish anyone, least of all himself, to make pronouncements on his work. For a while he was "the Bard of Omaha," until he started filming in the Santa Ynez Valley. To others, it seemed apt to describe him as the "midlife-crisis guy," forgetting that Ruth Stoops was still several decades removed from one. "It’s all a work in progress. I’m just beginning to learn what a film is. It’s a very elusive thing. I do know that I want to find myself in the position where I am only getting better with age. Lina Wertmüller once said that ‘Artists over many years lose many things, but not their anger.’ I admire directors who finished strong, like Buñuel. He always said that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I find myself, with age, getting angrier. The more you find with experience is a greater awareness of the subtleties of how we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I don’t really see how we can lose anger."

—Jessica Joffe

Mike’s Likes

Mike Wallace likes to ask a lot of questions—which can prove problematic when he’s the one being interviewed.

At Central Park Conservancy’s Oct. 14 fête honoring this year’s "Living Landmarks" honorees, we tried to get the 60 Minutes man’s opinion on the Presidential debate the night before. "Were you offended by the talk about the lesbian?" he asked The Transom. We told him we thought mentioning Mary Cheney was in poor taste. "I didn’t!" he harrumphed. "I mean, it had been a subject of public discussion before, handled very personably, I thought, by the Vice President the first time it came out …. I thought that Kerry was in charge, didn’t you? I think the consensus is that he was in charge.

"Who’s going to win?" he asked suddenly. "Do you think the fact that they’ve caught bin Laden will make a difference?" We raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Had we missed a press release? "Haven’t you heard? I say they’ve found bin Laden!" he repeated loudly. Asked if he was busting The Transom’s balls, Mr. Wallace crowed delightedly, "Absolutely!" So who’s going to win Nov. 2? "I’m not damn fool enough to answer that!"

Regardless of who prevails on Election Day, the following night will find Mr. Wallace at the $10,000-a-table gala with new inductees like actresses Candice Bergen and Whoopi Goldberg, literary agent Morton Janklow and Yankees pooh-bah George Steinbrenner. "I became one of these old hunks a few years ago!" he said as Liz Smith (who’ll host the Nov. 3 event) came over with socialite Iris Love, the aptly named archeologist who excavated what is thought to be the Temple of Aphrodite in Knidos. The two flirted for a moment. "You better get out of here or I’m gonna tear off your—" Mr. Wallace gestured to the front of Ms. Love’s blouse. She giggled girlishly.

"And now I’m going to give you a kiss on the mouth!" he said, leaning over to peck Ms. Smith—whom he’s known for 50 years—on the lips. The pair pleaded with the veteran newsman to join them for dinner downstairs at Le Cirque. He said that first he’d have to check with his wife, Mary. "Is it that your wife wouldn’t believe you were with two old maids?" Ms. Smith cackled. The two women scurried downstairs while Mr. Wallace secured permission from his wife via cell phone.

—Noelle Hancock