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It is beside the point that Alexander Garvin “never really paid attention to the Olympics” until he was recruited to plan one. Or that Garvin, a high school miler, ended his athletic career as soon as he earned his varsity letter. At 62, he said, “The sport I follow now is called opera. And the best athletes are the ones who can hit high C.”

Actually, his credentials are suitably Olympian: public official, author, university professor, real estate executive, heavyweight in the world of architecture and urban design.

Plus—and perhaps most important—Garvin describes himself as “a typical New Yorker; very skeptical,” even as he points to a lesson learned from famed builder Robert Moses: “The art of getting things done is something you have to include in all planning.” That could be the Olympic dichotomy in a nutshell: Be wary, be dreamy. Garvin has done the physical planning for the 2012 Summer Games in New York City, and “I am convinced,” he said, they will get done. His “Olympic X” blueprint—a simplified north-south, east-west road map through Gotham’s countless complications of congestion, municipal jurisdiction, security and so on—is meant to answer whatever questions the International Olympic Committee may raise.

“It’s all trains and ferries,” Garvin said, somehow making it sound closer to a routine outpatient procedure than open-heart surgery. “We’ve made a plan that does not intrude on the city of New York. And I genuinely believe that New York not only will have the best Olympics ever, but that the Olympics will be the greatest event ever in New York. Much bigger than the tall ships and the bicentennial.”

This production of operatic girth all springs from the bones of the “X,” and it all started for Garvin with a 1996 telephone call—”out of the blue from a man named Dan Doctoroff,” he said.

At the time, Doctoroff, now a deputy mayor, was working as an equity investment manager in midtown Manhattan and mulling a fairly outrageous thought: that the Olympics belonged in New York because the Games, in his mind, always have been Big Town’s alter ego. To Doctoroff, both the Olympics and New York bring citizens of the world together, both represent competition at the highest level, both are about the pursuit of dreams.

In that phone call seven years ago, Doctoroff confided in Garvin, however, that “everybody tells me I’m crazy.” He asked Garvin, “Do you think we could hold the Olympics in New York?”

Garvin said, “Sure.”

Doctoroff asked, “How would we do it?”

Garvin said, “I haven’t a clue in the world.”

Garvin had just finished his exhaustive, prize-winning book, “The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t.” He was, still is, a New York City planning commissioner, and had been deputy commissioner of housing, a private developer and a property manager. For the past 36 years, he has taught city planning at Yale, his alma mater. Most recently, he served as vice president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is taking on the city’s other massive, long-range endeavor, the revival at Ground Zero.

It is safe to say that Garvin knows his way around New York City. Born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he still lives, he said he “spent my entire childhood and adolescence in Central Park.” Asked, as an architect and planner, what his favorite building is in the city, he offered an immediate, “Central Park.”

His father, who emigrated from Russia in 1939, owned a canned meat factory in Flushing; his mother was an artist whose sculptures sit among the many paintings and countless CDs in his roomy apartment. Garvin’s early interest in gardening evolved into landscape architecture and then urban planning.

Hired by Doctoroff for the Olympic project—at the time, both believed the New York bid would be for 2008, until the U.S. Olympic Committee proclaimed that all American cities should wait for 2012—Garvin traveled to Atlanta shortly after the 1996 Summer Games to study venues there. He read bid books and reports from the ‘88 Seoul Olympics and ‘92 Barcelona Olympics. He recruited two of his former Yale architectural students, Chris Glasek and J.B. Clancy, and examined “at least” 300 potential competition and training sites in the metropolitan area.

“One day, in February [of 1997], I remember it vividly,” Garvin said. “A Tuesday. I got Chris and J.B. and I said, ‘We know enough. Today we’re going to close the door, no telephone, and figure it out.’ And each gave the same answer: ‘The Water Olympics.’

“I put a piece of tracing paper over a map and drew a line for the ferry [along the East River] and one for the railroad [from the Meadowlands to Nassau Coliseum on Long Island]. And that was the ‘X.’”

Garvin hired a helicopter and spent three days taking aerial photographs along his “X.” NYC2012’s 600-page bid book is filled with those photos as well as computer-enhanced renderings of how he visualizes them for the Games. Among the detail he has envisioned is a flotilla of tall ships sailing around the southern tip of Manhattan from the athletes’ village to the stadium for Opening Ceremonies on July 27, 2012.

To gather yet more details, he took in five days of the Sydney Olympics three years ago—”I was looking to see where the bathrooms were, where they put the newspapers reporters and so on”—and found himself “impressed with the live sites, the way people would gather in a park to watch the sports on a big screen, and they’d be selling cappuccino while there was an acrobat climbing a 40-story building and others were preparing a jazz concert.”

“Just getting on the trains with hundreds of people who were going to events. It was stirring. Exciting. I went to see beach volleyball, which I found enormously exciting; I thought it would be dull. I saw synchronized swimming, equestrian competition, rowing. I was there when the great Australian runner [Cathy Freeman] won her race. That was exciting.”

Such a thing in New York, Garvin believes, and what it will leave behind, could hit high C.