Plans go here. (Friends of the High Line)

"I'd love to see a locomotive up there," Chelsea resident Grant Anderson said before a packed auditorium at P.S. 11 last night. His proposal for the third and final section of the High Line, encircling the Hudson Yards, was met with a burst of spontaneous applause.

Not only did it have the proper fanciful feel of the park that seems to float, as if by magic, above the hubbub of Manhattan, but it also had its antecedents.  "One of the great things about the High Line is you still get a sense of history," he continued. "Just imagine the feeling—looking up and seeing a train and boxcar down the street."

The locomotive idea caught the imagination of the some 200 New Yorkers that showed up for the first of what will no doubt be many meetings to figure out what to do with the final section of the celebrated park.

Mr. Grant's proposal was actually the most daring of the evening, surprising considering the possibilities the park seems to offer and the New York penchant for outsized plans and zany schemes. Instead, sensible schemes dominated. No giant bronze pigeon statues, no gigantic movie screens, a fashion catwalks or even a pool either. What was on offer was mostly met with a unison of sage, thoughtful, nodding heads.

Attendee's voiced concerns over whether section three would relate to the neighborhood in the same way that the first to had embraced their surroundings.  One Manhattanite commented, "I think there's a danger that it may become just another nice planted park," in light of plans for the yards to be covered up and replaced with new shiny buildings. "It could lose some of the grittiness that makes section one and two great." Though never mind that that part of the High Line is now ringed by very shiny condos.

Attendees really seemed to hop aboard the history train. "People not from New York come here and think 'when did they build this?'" said one avid High Line fan from Long Island. "They have no idea of what you guys have gone through to build this, so what about erecting a permanent display to tell the full history."

Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond answered, revealing that when planning the first two sections, they "didn't want it to be cluttered with signs," he paused and said "We maybe went too far in limiting the signage." The Friends are now talking to the Parks Department about adding more signage and a possible cell phone history tour people can avail of.

Along with the Locomotive idea, the other most popular suggestion of the night was to create a dedicated performance space. Most agreed that the obvious best place for this would be the 'dead end' spur, a section of track that kicks out at 30th Street and creates one of the widest sections of the elevated park.

"Bathrooms", was the one word suggestion posed by a lady clearly on a mission, but until the High Line headquarters is built in 2013, more restrooms seem out of the question, the organizers responded. "I don't think we can wait until 2013" said another Chelsea woman. "On a Saturday the line is just unbelievable."

"I can't get more bathrooms until 2013, I wish I could," responded Mr. Hammond.

Growing vegetables was suggest by one person who thought it would act as a great educational point for the whole community, she was told that the planting is a primary concern but a vegetable patch is a valid recommendation  it but would need more support and research.

Before the meeting was thrown to the floor Mr. Hammond made a half-hour presentation outlining the Friends of the High Line's current draft proposal, which broke down the third section into a number of promising zones, including overlooks, "event" spaces and other "microclimates."

The big news Mr. Hammond revealed that the Friends are hoping to finish the High Line to before Hudson Yards, including a temporary walkway on the western side providing access, while Related forges ahead with construction on its 23-million-square-foot project. The prospect of an early opening was met with enthusiastic approval. "Josh and I thought 'why don't we build a temporary walkway and getting it up as soon as possible?'" Mr. Hammond said, referring to his Friends co-founder Joshua David

Only one dissenting voice was heard during the night. A woman who identified herself as a member of the Police Department, went on a meandering, somewhat pointless rant. "I walk through this neighborhood everyday to work, there's potholes in the ground, with cars constantly going over and into them, there's homeless... all you hear up on the High Line is foreign voices, no one speaks English." Apparently struggling to make a solid point, the woman told how she "spoke to one of the maintenance people" who told her it takes $150 million a year to maintain.

Mr. Hammond, flanked by an eager Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, assured her that the figure to maintain the park was $3 million a year, and every cent of that is raised by private donations. There was also the fact that a recent study showed roughly 50 percent of High Line users were New Yorkers, 25 percent foreign tourists and another 25 percent from the other 49 States.

The meeting concluded amidst smiling faces and shaking hands. "I remember it in the '70s and the change is phenomenal, it enriches mine and my wife's days just to look down on it" said Warren Kass, whose apartment overlooks the park. Artist Bob Schechter came to offer up all the money from his next exhibit to the High Line fund. "This neighborhood is nothing like it once was," he said, "Years ago in the day time they sold meat. And at night they sold a different type of meat!"

"The High Line is designed in a way that moves people like a vector through the urban context," Javier Santos offered. "A lot of the settling platforms just look off onto street-ways." He added, as an endorsement of a performance space,
"A reason to sit is something I'd want."

sduffey@observer.com

Those plans call for possibly removing a large portion of the High Line known as the “spur,” a piece that runs east-west just north of 30^th Street and crosses 10th Avenue. Also troubling the advocacy group: Related’s plans for the High Line on the western portion of the rail yards, where Stephen Ross and his development firm want to erect two buildings that straddle the rail line. Friends of the High Line says such buildings would block stunning views of the Hudson River at one of the greatest spots on the entire park.

More fireworks on Monday, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Red Cross, 520 West 49^th Street.

Expect a crowd: the High Line folks are offering free t-shirts!

Later this month, Friends of the High Line, the mastermind group behind the whole venture, is planning to release designs for Section 2, which runs up to 28th Street. Section 3, which runs into the West Side rail yards, will be designed by the Related Companies as part of its development of the yards.

More photos:

The project has acted as a super powerful magnet for great architecture, attracting the likes of Frank Gehry, who designed the IAC building above, along with a long, growing list of top architects for generally smaller hotels, offices and apartment buildings.

A shot at the base of the Standard, the hotel under constuction. Vegetation will grow through the rail tracks, which were carted off while the viaduct was renovated, then put back in place in the same spot, Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond told us.

The Standard, again.

This is up by 29th Street, looking north.

Friends of the High Line president and co-founder Robert Hammond doesn't believe it's going to happen—after all, he's already overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the conversion of the elevated railway into a new city park.

When he first went to Mayor Bloomberg, he said, "The Mayor said, 'Don't show us pretty pictures. We've got enough parks, we can't pay for them all.'"

So Hammond showed the city it could make money off the High Line—or at least, property owners in West Chelsea could and some other money would trickle down.

"I've seen this movie before," Hammond said today of Tishman Speyer's plans, speaking at the 2nd Annual Trends in New York City Land Use and Real Estate Development conference down at New York Law School this afternoon. "I think we'll get the whole Line," he said.

On April 10, thanks to its unrelenting social wattage and the drive of its founders, the High Line will have its long-awaited groundbreaking ceremony.

So Robert Hammond and his crew at the High Line seduced the city, fought down the railway company and, as a byproduct, made West Chelsea landholders quite happy. But the newest cultural entrepreneur on the block, Mr. Hammond’s—and Gifford Miller’s—schoolmate at Princeton, has embarked on a plan of even more absurd difficulty.

Barbara C. Romer’s project seems deceptively simple: She wants to build a modern version of London’s Globe Theater in a fort on Governors Island.

So move over, Brooke Astor and David Rockefeller! The new cultural entrepreneurs have created a new model for enacting change in the city.

Now, instead of the billionaires like Mr. Rockefeller—the man who got President Ronald Reagan to give the Customs House to the Museum of the American Indian over dinner—we’ve got a couple of kids from Princeton who are rebuilding the city, one celeb-filled party at a time.

Instead of assembling the doyennes of society and their checkbooks in a stuffy, closed-off Park Avenue apartment, they get Amy Sacco to throw a fête at Bungalow 8. And all you really have to do is trot out vegan technophile Moby—the truffle pig of mass-cultural capital.

ON MARCH 8, 35-YEAR-OLD MS. ROMER threw her first celeb-studded pop-cult seduction, after her first advisory board meeting at Soho House. “It was pretty easy, and pretty small,” said Celerie Kemble of the gala—she’s been pitching in. “Everybody involved knew 10 to 20 people who seemed appropriate or interested.”

“She’s a friend of ours,” Ms. Kemble said of Bungalow owner Amy Sacco, “and has been involved in the High Line, and is also a great advocate. She puts herself forward when there’s something she believes in. She’s a great person to brainstorm with about who are the right people to be in a project.”

So yes: Moby? Check! Bungalow? Yup! Celerie Kemble? It is so on!

Ms. Romer has a gorgeous model—for which she raised a bit more than $300,000 in architect’s fees from an anonymous donor—and more energy than an office of bureaucrats.

She’s got the support of downtown’s influential Community Board 1—“Overall, we’re very much in favor of cultural uses,” said Board 1 chair Julie Menin about Governors Island by phone from her vacation in Colorado this week.

She’s got a partnership with London’s Globe Theater.

And she’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman—the very embodiment of Cultural Seriousness—on her advisory board.

What she doesn’t have—at all—is the federal government, and their fort. The stuffy landmarks folks aren’t sold either—they’re “clutching their pearls,” as one culture maven put it. And so Ms. Romer has taken it to the people and their cultural elite—actors!

“We didn’t have that many celebrities,” said Mr. Hammond of his efforts on the High Line. “She has a much larger boldface-name contingent. Also, the nature of her project? That inherently makes more sense. Celebrities don’t spend a lot of time in parks—whereas they do appear in Shakespeare.”

And so there was, for one, Bebe Neuwirth at the party—brought by producer Eric Falkenstein—who was as taken as anyone else with Ms. Romer. “Very intelligent. Very eloquent. Very enthusiastic,” Ms. Neuwirth said. “It’s contagious! Her enthusiasm is contagious. That’s a very good quality to have. She doesn’t really need it, but she has it—the idea kind of sells itself.”

Ms. Romer’s “taking it to another level,” Mr. Hammond said.

“Robert has been a good friend,” Ms. Romer said. “And I’ve clearly watched them.”

“I just want to be clear,” the leggy Ms. Neuwirth said, “that I am not in favor of this new theater because I want to do plays, do Shakespeare. I just think it would be a great thing for New York City.”

GORGEOUS GOVERNORS ISLAND—about one-fifth the size of Central Park and much closer to downtown—was sold to New York by the U.S. for $1 in January of 2003.

Over the decades, the island has been passed around like a bong in a frat house. It once was the state’s; in 1800, it became federal; in 1966, it became the Coast Guard’s; in 2001, the forts and their 22 surrounding acres became a national monument; and in 2003, it came under the care of the National Parks Service. More than half of the rest of the 172-acre island is built of excavation from the Lexington Avenue subway dig.

Those acres are maintained by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, which in May will be in receipt of proposals by developers and schemers to turn it into a destination island. (The city has decided that residential use will not be considered—though picture it! Millionaires’ Island: only 225 buildings on it, and nary a homeless person in sight. Ah, well …. )

“There are going to be few parties that could really assemble a winning position,” said Meredith Oppenheim, a submitting developer who also works with her brother, Chad Oppenheim, a well-known Miami architect. “People are going to disqualify themselves based on the robust number of requirements.”

Among those expected to turn in proposals is Bruce Becker, whose firm, Becker + Becker Associates Inc., did the largest project on Roosevelt Island: the rehabilitation of the Octagon, a former insane asylum in which Mae West was once a prisoner, into a high-end and highly green residential building. “I’m currently sort of developing different concepts,” Mr. Becker said. “If I’m confident I’ve got a winner, I’ll be submitting on the 10th of May. I’m enormously distracted about it—I can’t stop thinking about it!”

Others are proposing smaller projects, particularly with an eye to being in the mix so as to work on group projects after the winning teams are selected. Jay M. Schippers, for one, is proposing bed-and-breakfast-like hotel uses of some of the existing buildings.

Other expected proposers include the “Global Country of World Peace,” a project of the followers of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Phoenix House, a chain of drug and alcohol treatment centers. Uh, yeah—destination: Rehab Island!

There is no proposal process for the 22 acres under National Parks Service control, however. On that north side of the island are its two national monuments, the round Castle Williams and the odd rectangle-within-a-star of Fort Jay, both built between 1794 and 1811.

Back in January 2005, the National Parks Service released a newsletter that recounted public hearings and explained their preliminary plans. Their “Alternative A” would be an educational park, devoted to “harbor defense themes,” a phrase possibly so chilling in its boringness as to induce at least an eight on the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale. Castle Williams would become, unbelievably, a “Harbor Defense Museum.”

An “Alternative B” would also have a bit of history, but would create “an island-wide cultural experience” through collaboration with arts organizations.

“Alternative C” would turn the area into some sort of environmentalist something-or-other; the lawns of Fort Jay would host an “interactive educational water feature.”

In February 2005, The New York Times said that the National Parks Service Governors Island superintendent, Linda Neal, had described Barbara Romer’s Globe Theater plan as “exciting.” Clearly, it fits with her office’s Alternative B.

But this week, Ms. Neal said: “Well, we don’t have any formal relationship with [Ms. Romer]. She’s looking at buildings not only on Parks Service property but GIPEC property. It’s complicated,” she added. “We’re not there.”

Ms. Neal’s office is in building 107 on Governors Island; she is cater-corner from the GIPEC offices. (“In the nicer months,” she said, “we open the windows and yell to each other. It’s like Mayberry!”)

Ms. Neal talked about Ms. Romer’s project this way: “As you know, it’s gotten a lot of publicity. I think the thing it has done is raise people’s awareness of Governors Island, and got people thinking we need something special to happen out there. Her idea has been graphically depicted, and so a lot of people have gotten interested, because it’s the first visual proposal out there.”

But. “I think come soon after May 10—our Oscar night, when GIPEC opens their envelopes—there’ll be several proposals that’ll see the light of day and be showcased. Much like the World Trade Center when various proposals come out—that gets people thinking about what could be out there.”

Ah, life during wartime. Of course: Why wouldn’t the federal government want to plunk a tribute to the majesty of military greatness just a stone’s throw from the World Trade Center pit?

Even though we already have the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn?

And even if the location is Castle Williams, the former holding center for Confederate prisoners of war—whose cannons have never even fired a shot?

MS. ROMER HAS JUST MOVED her own military fortifications for the New Globe Theater project from her Upper West Side apartment to a small office on the top floor of a building on Fifth Avenue, in the Flatiron district. A little sticker on the door of stylish Suite 914 reads “Kemble Interiors.”

Ms. Romer has a German accent with more than a hint of London to it. She grew up in Germany but went to high school in Ohio and got her doctorate in Cambridge. She wears cute glasses and black and is, as all reports indicate, extremely winning.

She also knows her local forts. “There’s Fort Wood, built in 1811, same year as Castle Wiliams. In 1886, we decided to put a huge French military sculpture on top of it—the Statue of Liberty? Nobody knows Fort Wood. We’re trying to elevate Castle Williams in the same way.”

She’s good, right? “Castle Clinton—same year, same architect—was turned into an opera house in the 1850’s that fit 6,000 people. There are precedents in taking military forts and repurposing them in New York.”

“The National Parks Service says they want to do what ‘America’ wants,” she said with cheer. Clearly, Ms. Romer plans to foment a particular want.

But wait. What if the new cultural entrepreneurs turned their attentions to, say, homelessness, or national health care? Or what if they shipped Moby over to Baghdad—couldn’t he use his downtown influence to fix up that bad scene? With their superhuman skills at organizing and fund-raising, isn’t it a little unfair for people like Robert Hammond and Barbara Romer to be mobilizing millions of dollars and all that energy for Shakespeare theaters and fruity little parks?

“How do you value having 100,000 kids a year having a beautiful day and a growing experience, and realizing they can be whatever they want to be?” Ms. Romer said. “How can you measure that?”

(And how can we measure Moby? “He’s great because when there’s something he cares about, he steps in quickly and puts as much out there to help it as he can,” said Celerie Kemble. “We had talked to him about it months before the project. He was very excited, because he is a big advocate of exciting use of public space. And he has lots of friends who are actors and involved in the theater. Again, there are so many people who couldn’t be more excited to see more public performance space come into the city.”)

Ms. Romer has just introduced a pledge campaign for the theater. Her philanthropic catalog offers naming opportunities for the administration building or the education building (which would lie across the border, in GIPEC-land) for $1 million or $2.5 million.

There are also 110 second-tier theater seats available for naming, at $7,500 each. “The Mayor sits to your left,” reads the offering plan, “Gwyneth Paltrow three seats to your right, and you could swear that that is the back of Dick Parsons’s head.” The cool-but-poor can buy in for a hundred bucks per restroom faucet.

But what do they get if they pay now? “They own the right to name”—for instance—“the green room,” Ms. Romer said. “So I have the piece of paper to say they owe that money. Then they get to be the ones to have first pick. Lucky them!

“This might sound strange,” she said, “but to me, looking at the castle and the proposal, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. I mean, look at this.”

Now that Ms. Romer has the social oomph and soon will have those willing to pay in, what she needs next is the George Balanchine to her Lincoln Kirstein—an artistic director for her theater that will cement the excitement of actors. That will also sustain her parade of boldface names.

Because then what will the poor Park Service do? How will they refuse Al Pacino and Judy Dench?

And how long will it take her to win this war? “The good thing is, it was built for the War of 1812,” she said of the castle, or her castle, “so there’s a good anniversary coming up.

“O.K.,” she added, “that’s worst-case scenario.”

—additional reporting by Michael Calderone

On April 10, thanks to its unrelenting social wattage and the drive of its founders, the High Line will have its long-awaited groundbreaking ceremony.

So Robert Hammond and his crew at the High Line seduced the city, fought down the railway company and, as a byproduct, made West Chelsea landholders quite happy. But the newest cultural entrepreneur on the block, Mr. Hammond’s—and Gifford Miller’s—schoolmate at Princeton, has embarked on a plan of even more absurd difficulty.

Barbara C. Romer’s project seems deceptively simple: She wants to build a modern version of London’s Globe Theater in a fort on Governors Island.

So move over, Brooke Astor and David Rockefeller! The new cultural entrepreneurs have created a new model for enacting change in the city.

Now, instead of the billionaires like Mr. Rockefeller—the man who got President Ronald Reagan to give the Customs House to the Museum of the American Indian over dinner—we’ve got a couple of kids from Princeton who are rebuilding the city, one celeb-filled party at a time.

Instead of assembling the doyennes of society and their checkbooks in a stuffy, closed-off Park Avenue apartment, they get Amy Sacco to throw a fête at Bungalow 8. And all you really have to do is trot out vegan technophile Moby—the truffle pig of mass-cultural capital.

ON MARCH 8, 35-YEAR-OLD MS. ROMER threw her first celeb-studded pop-cult seduction, after her first advisory board meeting at Soho House. “It was pretty easy, and pretty small,” said Celerie Kemble of the gala—she’s been pitching in. “Everybody involved knew 10 to 20 people who seemed appropriate or interested.”

“She’s a friend of ours,” Ms. Kemble said of Bungalow owner Amy Sacco, “and has been involved in the High Line, and is also a great advocate. She puts herself forward when there’s something she believes in. She’s a great person to brainstorm with about who are the right people to be in a project.”

So yes: Moby? Check! Bungalow? Yup! Celerie Kemble? It is so on!

Ms. Romer has a gorgeous model—for which she raised a bit more than $300,000 in architect’s fees from an anonymous donor—and more energy than an office of bureaucrats.

She’s got the support of downtown’s influential Community Board 1—“Overall, we’re very much in favor of cultural uses,” said Board 1 chair Julie Menin about Governors Island by phone from her vacation in Colorado this week.

She’s got a partnership with London’s Globe Theater.

And she’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman—the very embodiment of Cultural Seriousness—on her advisory board.

What she doesn’t have—at all—is the federal government, and their fort. The stuffy landmarks folks aren’t sold either—they’re “clutching their pearls,” as one culture maven put it. And so Ms. Romer has taken it to the people and their cultural elite—actors!

“We didn’t have that many celebrities,” said Mr. Hammond of his efforts on the High Line. “She has a much larger boldface-name contingent. Also, the nature of her project? That inherently makes more sense. Celebrities don’t spend a lot of time in parks—whereas they do appear in Shakespeare.”

And so there was, for one, Bebe Neuwirth at the party—brought by producer Eric Falkenstein—who was as taken as anyone else with Ms. Romer. “Very intelligent. Very eloquent. Very enthusiastic,” Ms. Neuwirth said. “It’s contagious! Her enthusiasm is contagious. That’s a very good quality to have. She doesn’t really need it, but she has it—the idea kind of sells itself.”

Ms. Romer’s “taking it to another level,” Mr. Hammond said.

“Robert has been a good friend,” Ms. Romer said. “And I’ve clearly watched them.”

“I just want to be clear,” the leggy Ms. Neuwirth said, “that I am not in favor of this new theater because I want to do plays, do Shakespeare. I just think it would be a great thing for New York City.”

GORGEOUS GOVERNORS ISLAND—about one-fifth the size of Central Park and much closer to downtown—was sold to New York by the U.S. for $1 in January of 2003.

Over the decades, the island has been passed around like a bong in a frat house. It once was the state’s; in 1800, it became federal; in 1966, it became the Coast Guard’s; in 2001, the forts and their 22 surrounding acres became a national monument; and in 2003, it came under the care of the National Parks Service. More than half of the rest of the 172-acre island is built of excavation from the Lexington Avenue subway dig.

Those acres are maintained by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, which in May will be in receipt of proposals by developers and schemers to turn it into a destination island. (The city has decided that residential use will not be considered—though picture it! Millionaires’ Island: only 225 buildings on it, and nary a homeless person in sight. Ah, well …. )

“There are going to be few parties that could really assemble a winning position,” said Meredith Oppenheim, a submitting developer who also works with her brother, Chad Oppenheim, a well-known Miami architect. “People are going to disqualify themselves based on the robust number of requirements.”

Among those expected to turn in proposals is Bruce Becker, whose firm, Becker + Becker Associates Inc., did the largest project on Roosevelt Island: the rehabilitation of the Octagon, a former insane asylum in which Mae West was once a prisoner, into a high-end and highly green residential building. “I’m currently sort of developing different concepts,” Mr. Becker said. “If I’m confident I’ve got a winner, I’ll be submitting on the 10th of May. I’m enormously distracted about it—I can’t stop thinking about it!”

Others are proposing smaller projects, particularly with an eye to being in the mix so as to work on group projects after the winning teams are selected. Jay M. Schippers, for one, is proposing bed-and-breakfast-like hotel uses of some of the existing buildings.

Other expected proposers include the “Global Country of World Peace,” a project of the followers of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Phoenix House, a chain of drug and alcohol treatment centers. Uh, yeah—destination: Rehab Island!

There is no proposal process for the 22 acres under National Parks Service control, however. On that north side of the island are its two national monuments, the round Castle Williams and the odd rectangle-within-a-star of Fort Jay, both built between 1794 and 1811.

Back in January 2005, the National Parks Service released a newsletter that recounted public hearings and explained their preliminary plans. Their “Alternative A” would be an educational park, devoted to “harbor defense themes,” a phrase possibly so chilling in its boringness as to induce at least an eight on the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale. Castle Williams would become, unbelievably, a “Harbor Defense Museum.”

An “Alternative B” would also have a bit of history, but would create “an island-wide cultural experience” through collaboration with arts organizations.

“Alternative C” would turn the area into some sort of environmentalist something-or-other; the lawns of Fort Jay would host an “interactive educational water feature.”

In February 2005, The New York Times said that the National Parks Service Governors Island superintendent, Linda Neal, had described Barbara Romer’s Globe Theater plan as “exciting.” Clearly, it fits with her office’s Alternative B.

But this week, Ms. Neal said: “Well, we don’t have any formal relationship with [Ms. Romer]. She’s looking at buildings not only on Parks Service property but GIPEC property. It’s complicated,” she added. “We’re not there.”

Ms. Neal’s office is in building 107 on Governors Island; she is cater-corner from the GIPEC offices. (“In the nicer months,” she said, “we open the windows and yell to each other. It’s like Mayberry!”)

Ms. Neal talked about Ms. Romer’s project this way: “As you know, it’s gotten a lot of publicity. I think the thing it has done is raise people’s awareness of Governors Island, and got people thinking we need something special to happen out there. Her idea has been graphically depicted, and so a lot of people have gotten interested, because it’s the first visual proposal out there.”

But. “I think come soon after May 10—our Oscar night, when GIPEC opens their envelopes—there’ll be several proposals that’ll see the light of day and be showcased. Much like the World Trade Center when various proposals come out—that gets people thinking about what could be out there.”

Ah, life during wartime. Of course: Why wouldn’t the federal government want to plunk a tribute to the majesty of military greatness just a stone’s throw from the World Trade Center pit?

Even though we already have the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn?

And even if the location is Castle Williams, the former holding center for Confederate prisoners of war—whose cannons have never even fired a shot?

MS. ROMER HAS JUST MOVED her own military fortifications for the New Globe Theater project from her Upper West Side apartment to a small office on the top floor of a building on Fifth Avenue, in the Flatiron district. A little sticker on the door of stylish Suite 914 reads “Kemble Interiors.”

Ms. Romer has a German accent with more than a hint of London to it. She grew up in Germany but went to high school in Ohio and got her doctorate in Cambridge. She wears cute glasses and black and is, as all reports indicate, extremely winning.

She also knows her local forts. “There’s Fort Wood, built in 1811, same year as Castle Wiliams. In 1886, we decided to put a huge French military sculpture on top of it—the Statue of Liberty? Nobody knows Fort Wood. We’re trying to elevate Castle Williams in the same way.”

She’s good, right? “Castle Clinton—same year, same architect—was turned into an opera house in the 1850’s that fit 6,000 people. There are precedents in taking military forts and repurposing them in New York.”

“The National Parks Service says they want to do what ‘America’ wants,” she said with cheer. Clearly, Ms. Romer plans to foment a particular want.

But wait. What if the new cultural entrepreneurs turned their attentions to, say, homelessness, or national health care? Or what if they shipped Moby over to Baghdad—couldn’t he use his downtown influence to fix up that bad scene? With their superhuman skills at organizing and fund-raising, isn’t it a little unfair for people like Robert Hammond and Barbara Romer to be mobilizing millions of dollars and all that energy for Shakespeare theaters and fruity little parks?

“How do you value having 100,000 kids a year having a beautiful day and a growing experience, and realizing they can be whatever they want to be?” Ms. Romer said. “How can you measure that?”

(And how can we measure Moby? “He’s great because when there’s something he cares about, he steps in quickly and puts as much out there to help it as he can,” said Celerie Kemble. “We had talked to him about it months before the project. He was very excited, because he is a big advocate of exciting use of public space. And he has lots of friends who are actors and involved in the theater. Again, there are so many people who couldn’t be more excited to see more public performance space come into the city.”)

Ms. Romer has just introduced a pledge campaign for the theater. Her philanthropic catalog offers naming opportunities for the administration building or the education building (which would lie across the border, in GIPEC-land) for $1 million or $2.5 million.

There are also 110 second-tier theater seats available for naming, at $7,500 each. “The Mayor sits to your left,” reads the offering plan, “Gwyneth Paltrow three seats to your right, and you could swear that that is the back of Dick Parsons’s head.” The cool-but-poor can buy in for a hundred bucks per restroom faucet.

But what do they get if they pay now? “They own the right to name”—for instance—“the green room,” Ms. Romer said. “So I have the piece of paper to say they owe that money. Then they get to be the ones to have first pick. Lucky them!

“This might sound strange,” she said, “but to me, looking at the castle and the proposal, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. I mean, look at this.”

Now that Ms. Romer has the social oomph and soon will have those willing to pay in, what she needs next is the George Balanchine to her Lincoln Kirstein—an artistic director for her theater that will cement the excitement of actors. That will also sustain her parade of boldface names.

Because then what will the poor Park Service do? How will they refuse Al Pacino and Judy Dench?

And how long will it take her to win this war? “The good thing is, it was built for the War of 1812,” she said of the castle, or her castle, “so there’s a good anniversary coming up.

“O.K.,” she added, “that’s worst-case scenario.”

—additional reporting by Michael Calderone

And in revenge for her years of ill treatment, landlords and developers may be allowed to spend the next decade in a shock-and-awe campaign on the West Chelsea district.

The High Line, which runs largely along 10th Avenue from 34th Street to Gansevoort Street, will with care grow to be the pre-eminent leggy supermodel of West Chelsea. The pretty, pretty High Line Park evidently will, with one hand, wipe the Beuysian sweat from the brow of art superdealer Larry Gagosian and, with the other, dispense solar-power-made lattes to the poor. Who could gripe about such a fantastic new celebrity of the city-particularly given her horrific childhood?

The plot congeals. Before baby High Line can be officially adopted, the fight must occur between what dreamers scheme and what can actually be agreed upon and paid for. And with all the hoopla about that petite and high-heeled charmer of a $65 million park-to-be, no one has yet interrogated the city's incredibly crafty (suspicious?) plan: a rezoning idea that may actually satisfy expansion-hungry 10th Avenue landlords, tight-ass West Chelsea art dealers and the open-space-loving idealists who have taken the High Line under their wing. The binding ingredient of this plan is simply this: the ability of owners of property beneath the High Line to sell their vertical-development rights to nearby avenue-bordering properties.

Any sane New Yorker would rather face dinner for two avec NY1's gabbling "parenting expert," Shelley Goldberg, than hear a single dull word about zoning. As a result, citizens can only blame their jaded selves for facing neighborhood development unprepared. Is the shiny, enchanting High Line Park hypnotic enough to distract us from judging the city's plan to install 50 times the number of current dwelling units in 14 or so blocks of the small West Chelsea district? The High Line, after all, only stretches 1.45 miles. A survey describes it as 30 feet wide, which would make the total park-to-be a mere 5.27 acres. You could accommodate nearly 160 High Lines in Central Park. Even the East Village's little Tompkins Square Park is nearly double the area of the Heidi Klum–thin High Line. Landlords twirl the handlebars of their mustaches and cackle maniacally; perhaps we've all been tied to the rails of a tiny elevated delight. (I use "we" purposefully: It should be disclosed that I have owned a gallery operating in West Chelsea since 1997.)

At community-board meetings, Chelsea residents have fretted that rezoning-propagated high-rises would create a forbidding wall along 10th Avenue. You could say that it might be a physical manifestation of a wall that already exists. It's a matter of course that the "West Chelsea Arts District" will be segregated physically and economically from the public housing across 10th Avenue. The art dealers didn't move to West Chelsea because they were taken by the proximity to public housing-apart, of course, from NYCHA's naturally depressive role in keeping industrial rents cheap.

The changes may come fast. In the spring of 2004, public review of the special West Chelsea district will begin. In summer of 2004, there will emerge a proposed park design for the High Line, put forward by the community group Friends of the High Line. In fall of 2004, the city hopes to officially adopt the zoning. At that moment, the starting gun will fire and a million-O.K., a couple dozen-long-suffering landlords will begin to build the shit out of West Chelsea. Amanda Burden, chair of the City Planning Commission, will toss this gerrymandered bouquet of zoning to the assembled neglected bachelorettes of West Chelsea, the pretty ribbon of the High Line Park binding it all together in mid-air

Friends in High Places

"THIS IS A HOT NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE UP AND UP. $65 MILLION HIGH-LINE PARK COMING SOON; BEST GALLERY BLOCK IN MANHATTAN NEXT DOOR; CHELSEA PIERS SPORTS COMPLEX DOWN THE STREET; CLUBS NEARBY: IN SHORT, A DESTINATION," shouts a caps-lock-ignorant ad on Craigslist.org. The property advertised: a 1,300-square-foot store (with basement) with a rent of $10,000 dollars a month. Located on 10th Avenue south of 23rd Street, the property was just listed (or, more likely, relisted) this weekend: Its broker refused to share information regarding the ad's response. And just up the road a bit-in the parlance of Craigslist, "this is in or around 27th near 10th Ave."-there's a 5,000-square-foot space for rent at $16,670 a month. "[T]his would be a great spot for a restaurant/nightclub/art gallery, retail, anything!" wrote broker Kathy Pappas in that ad.

Anything! Chelsea is ready for anything, and it's so going to get it.

The painter Patrick Mimran has terrorized the West Chelsea art community for the last three years with his anything. His misguided project has commandeered the billboards that hang from the High Line on West 24th, 25th and 26th streets. The reported total yearly cost of these advertisements is $60,000, a high price to pay to prove the penultimate of Walter Benjamin's 13 theses for the critic: The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion . The text of these billboards is printed in big black letters on a white background; recently, his name has appeared printed below in red. "To express conceptual ideas write a book, don't paint," he instructs Chelsea desk girls and collectors alike. "Don't hate what you prefer," he chides. His attack on the meritocracy of the marketplace: "Bad art is still art."

But there is another young painter also working out of métier in Chelsea and on the High Line, one Robert Hammond. (Mr. Mimran would undoubtedly hate Mr. Hammond's paintings, and that can only be a good thing.) Mr. Hammond is the co-founder of Friends of the High Line, the group that has suddenly found itself at the very center of the redevelopment of West Chelsea.

The Friends maintain an office in the Hudson Guild on West 26th Street. They'll soon be moving down to the meatpacking district, to the Starpoint building that houses the rowdy bar Hogs and Heifers-but for now, the doll-size Friends of the High Line office resembles the newspaper room of any John Hughes–era high school. A fresh-faced team of five is cheerfully packed in the crowded space. There is a happy urgency: The previous Sunday, Kenneth T. Jackson, current president of the New-York Historical Society and highly regarded historian, had penned a massive editorial in favor of preservation of the High Line in The New York Times at the paper's invitation. (Perhaps one can presume that the editorial was Dr. Jackson's apology for omitting an entry on the High Line in his 1995 Encyclopedia of New York City .)

The monstrously charismatic Mr. Hammond couldn't be more suited for the role of the accidental advocate. He's conservatively yet sportily dressed in a gray sweater and a differently gray shirt over a white T-shirt. His fashionable glasses and trimmed hair mark him as a professional do-gooder. But wait! A not insubstantial hidden hole in his lovely sweater indicates that one shouldn't presume a lack of downtown spice in the man-nor should that prejudice the court in the adoption proceedings for baby High Line, either.

The story of Mr. Hammond and his partner in things High Line, the writer Joshua David, is by now oft told. Neither particularly wanted to lead a crusade to save the High Line, but at the time-1999-the Giuliani administration was ready to indulge the hungry property owners of 10th Avenue in the destruction of the High Line. Although both Mr. Hammond and Mr. David were otherwise employed, before they knew it they found themselves filing suit against the city.

A consortium calling itself the Chelsea Property Owners had agreed to cover any costs greater than $7 million for demolition of the High Line, and the railway company CSX, the actual current owner of the dormant railway, had always indicated that it was amenable to whatever legally kosher decision the West Chelsea community and the city would unanimously make. Just as Mr. Giuliani left office, he leap-frogged the process with a parting gift to the landowners in the form of an agreement for voluntary abandonment of the railway. Friends of the High Line was forced to prove that the intended demolition clearly ran counter to the city's land-use review policy.

Fortunately, even before his election, Mike Bloomberg had made his support for the renovation of the High Line explicit. Since then, the tables have turned, and the High Line is now the pretty floral centerpiece of the Chelsea dinner party to come.

The charming Mr. Hammond is, at least publicly, the most sincere of all idealists. He is also no idiot: The board of Friends includes such top-notch operators as Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the first director of cultural affairs for New York City (and lucky owner of the funniest name ever), and Philip Aarons, the force behind the early-90's development of Lincoln Center.

Mr. Hammond's focus is appropriately on a concern for Chelsea as "mostly a low-middle-income neighborhood" where "90 percent of kids here are on a public lunch program." Behind a divider on the other side of the Hudson Guild room where we talked, an E.S.L. class chanted in confused unison. Mr. Hammond is also careful to distinguish himself and his Friends from the deal being struck all around the High Line. As he put it, "Zoning is not the High Line." He is also optimistic about the goodness of things: The "city's making a lot of efforts to build more affordable housing."

In the city's Aug. 15, 2003, environmental-assessment statement, "Special West Chelsea District Rezoning," the anticipated impact of the city's scheme is explored in tiresome detail. About affordable housing, that plan is strangely silent. (Duly noted: These are preliminary documents.) Residential development as per the city's Reasonable Worst-Case Development Scenario is estimated to be a total of 4,174 dwelling units in "elevator apartment buildings and lofts." The space for the number of low-to-moderate-income units is left blank.

Just back in 1999, the city approved massive rezoning throughout Chelsea, including a special mixed-use district in West Chelsea, resulting in the modest yet posh new residential units on West 22nd Street (reportedly home to Björk, among others: IN SHORT, A DESTINATION), and likewise the towering hideosities of Sixth Avenue. To translate the current rezoning proposal into English: If adopted as is, the art galleries mid-block will remain largely unchanged. (Amusingly, this zoning retention could be considered to make a de facto historical gallery district out of a neighborhood only really occupied by the galleries since 1997.) Along and around West 30th Street and 17th and 18th streets will be high-density mixed use. Tenth and 11th avenues will have ground and low-floor commercial and higher-floor residential uses-quite higher, in some instances.

When the city first began preparing these reports, the residential population of the West Chelsea zone was all but invisible. Officially, there are 82 current dwelling units. The 2000 census claims approximately 1,061 residents, which means these two numbers must be from differently bordered areas (or realities-West Chelsea residents do not live 13 to an apartment). These residents, learning from the development of Soho, have formed local tenants' associations and have joined citywide tenants' groups. Timothy Smith, a resident of West 26th Street, has "lived illegally in these buildings for 10 years and lived in the immediate vicinity for 20. I've been around," he said cheerfully, "since there were drug dealers and hookers, and now there are art dealers and artists. Nothing has changed." His opinion is that "most tenants are in some sort of action with the owners of their buildings"-some on good terms (that is, paying rent), some not.

The smart and wry Mr. Smith, who is the managing director of the Armory Show Inc.-one of the most prestigious fairs of contemporary art in the world-described himself as optimistic for the future of the neighborhood. It is clear that he falls on the cynical side of optimism, however: "All you have to do is look at the city to see the real-estate people usually win," he said. He is decidedly pragmatic about the future of Chelsea. "Wherever there is waterfront, there are high-rise buildings for people to look out over it. Chicago, Rio: They're going to build high-rises anyway." And, of course, he has the gentle nostalgia of anyone who has seen a neighborhood explode into commerce: "This neighborhood wasn't attractive to anyone but people living on the fringe. The fringe is gone." One of Mr. Smith's neighbors, who asked that his name not be used, sounded almost wistful when he reported on the old fringe of Chelsea: "The pimps played games right outside my door in their pink fur coats. Seven or eight pimps-I'd go out Sunday morning, I'd literally have to walk through them."

Thanks to their careful organizing, and also labors on their behalf by Chelsea Assemblyman Dick Gottfried, the tenants will most probably succeed in not only not being evicted, but in converting their housing to soon-to-be-parkside legal dwellings.

More secure amid the coming storm of development are the 200-plus art galleries of the skinny West Chelsea strip. Even during the city's 30 months of recession, many art dealers reported a fairly stable economy in Chelsea. Of course, the gallery district is IN SHORT, A DESTINATION, and the industry remains stable partly due to sheer mass and concentration. According to Glenn McMillan, the exuberant "G" of CRG Gallery on West 22nd Street, the current buoyancy in Chelsea's market can be also explained by collectors' "disincentive to put money in stocks." His particular concern about the development of Chelsea is traffic, congestion and transportation. He's not crazy, either: According to the city's draft environmental-impact statement, there would be a projected "net increment of approximately 511, 739, and 694 vehicle trips" morning, noon and night, respectively.

'Not about buildability'

Apart from the cavernous galleries, consider the architectural queerities of West Chelsea, both extant and planned: The massive Starrett-Lehigh building squats on an entire block over at 26th and 11th, counting among its commercial space 75,000 square feet of pure Martha Stewart. Consider Barry Diller's new headquarters for InterActiveCorp, to be a Frank Gehry wackosity on the West Side Highway between 18th and 19th streets, due for completion in 2006. (Wagers on the struggle between Mr. Gehry's tardiness and Mr. Diller's ferocity should be filed with one's bookie immediately.)

Amongst all West Chelsea's anomalies of commercial space-the preliminary drawing of the Gehry building is a lovely yet tortured Gehry "look what I can do!" sideshow, very only-child-any design at all placed upon the High Line will seem completely at home. That's fortunate. More than 100 of the entries to the Friends of the High Line's open design competition were exhibited in Grand Central Terminal this summer, and they were-to put it mildly-completely outlandish.

The competition was described by the Friends as "not being about buildability." That's not a non-word you have to tempt an architect with twice. Designing without the constraints of humanity or finance or gravity, without the real-world presence of fur-clad pimps or the inevitable drag queen giving head to a john at the end of a darkened platform, this freedom is the nocturnal emission of architects everywhere. And when-O.K., if-it is executed, the day-to-day existence of the High Line Park will be a fight of the paper plans of the aesthetes and the body fluids of the sordid classes.

It's safe to say a few things about the proposals in general. First, many underemployed architects are smoking what everyone's favorite conceptual architect, Zaha Hadid, is smoking. (Remember: "Bad art is still art.") Most disturbing of any of the trends in these proposals, the 80's postmodern pun is alive and well: retro-infrastructures. (Re)engaged infrastructure. Move(able) Feast. One chaos-theory glassy design is, hilariously, taglined "space without qualities."

Standing entirely apart from the other entries is Brooklyn residents Misha Sklar and Yevgeniya Plechkina's proposal for a tri-level park, prison and pool. This fantastic piece of satire- cum -manifesto is a precise comment on outdoor space, on the leisure class and on how New Yorkers do not see themselves as Americans. Of course, there is already a prison in West Chelsea, the Bayview Correctional Facility, at the corner of 20th Street and 11th Avenue. But this proposal would make explicit in a lovely fashion the hidden subtleties of a Saturday afternoon, as collectors brush by prison visitors in the stiff Hudson winter wind.

Absolutely everyone loves the idea of Nathalie Rinne's entry: a mile-and-a-half-long swimming pool. (Anticipate, however, the New York Post headline: "High Line Pool: You're-in Trouble!") What's more poetic? Water in the sky, a memorial marker to the death of a dusty life of industry belonging to a Manhattan that no one remembers. The borough is well on its way to becoming a "space without qualities," indeed. People's deep attraction to the High Line must, I think, be partly a reaction to the stock sameness of the new constructions, the neighborhoods unfringed, the forlorn empty hype of movie-set Manhattan. The High Line is distinguished as refugee and oddity: something special in the air, to coin a phrase.

Strong yet cryptic among the High Line's entries was a proposal by Robert Huebser and Benjamin Haupt of the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (roughly: University for Organization). Their "Black Market Crawler" is a lovely if much too postmodern idea for a randomly rail-traveling thing-place, but, in a phrase that continues to haunt, they mark the High Line to be used for activities such as "leisure, pleasure, sex and crime": the four communal activities that bind us all across the rails of class.

Future Shock

Sex and crime: key elements of the West Chelsea that once was and is no more-unless of course you count the recent sales-tax-evasion gallery scandals. As Robert Hammond and his merry Friends prepare what he says will be "a realizable plan in the next 12 months," he will remain energized by a community-input forum that took place the week before we met, attended by 400 largely enthusiastic people. One hopes these perky people have not suffered the vision of what may be an omen of the development to come. Built most recently near the High Line is an eight-story residential building outwardly so ugly that it defies comprehension. (According to residents of the building, the interior is quite amenable-two bedroom, two-bath, "under $3,000.") Located on the corner of 10th Avenue and 20th Street, it has retail windows that sit sadly unrented; they absently reflect the High Line.

Speaking of ugly, Sixth Avenue's recent development offers another cautionary tale: How pleasant will the experience of 14 or so city blocks under constant construction be throughout the next decade? Despite all this, the charming Rachaele Raynoff, press secretary for the department of city planning, is absolutely amped about West Chelsea rezoning. From her description-and that of Robert Hammond and others-the Oct. 2 West Chelsea community meeting was a lovefest of developers and residents and High Line enthusiasts. She explained the air-rights-transfer invention, the secret to the happiness of landlords who were so recently willing to spend millions of dollars to destroy the High Line. Ms. Raynoff later even e-mailed me a cute city-produced graphic to explain this idea. Like moisture in a feminine-hygiene-product commercial, airspace is wicked away from the High-Line–occluded properties to the tall buildings on the avenues. Everybody, it seems, wins. Those with property directly abutting the High Line would even be encouraged to install adorable space-age cafés opening directly onto the High Line Park itself.

At this point, it seems almost safe to say that the rusty lonely baby High Line will in fact grow up to become big High Line Park. CSX, the railroad's owners, should certainly be eager to stop paying to maintain the High Line, and as soon as a consensus is reached that thoroughly meets legal requirements, CSX will withdraw-without even a penny for their expensive troubles. The residents themselves seem cautiously on board: Everyone reports himself to be an optimist now. Surely, like all New York projects, the High Line will reflect compromise. With any luck at least, any rollerbladers on the High Line Park will be executed-perhaps as part of a revenue-producing High Line reality television show!

The high-speed nightmare of the nearby Hudson River Park will hopefully be a cautionary tale, not an inspiration. Fortunately, people are "asking for quieter space," according to Mr. Hammond, and "They don't want it to be a normal park." The Park may indeed turn out to be an amazing oddity of slow uses, and a great labor of love for some, and undoubtedly a large expense in years of dubious financial security for New York City. Maybe the fringe will be back.

Later yet the High Line might well become another minor disdained luxury of Manhattan: Many of us will walk under it begrudgingly after a late night at our newly built and overcrowded offices. The young Chelsea dealer Derek Eller put it like this: "Sounds like a nice idea, but when I'm finished working, I like to get the hell out of Chelsea." But perhaps when the workers go home the residents-mostly new members of the community, a few old-will remain to stay and play together.