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Alexander Garvin, a professor of city planning at Yale and a member of the New York City Planning Commission, spends most of his free evenings at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. He has never been to a professional football game in his life, and he never watches sports on television. On the day of the Super Bowl, he visited the Frick Collection. Yet Garvin is the man who has figured out how a huge athletic stadium could be built on a piece of vacant land along the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, something that Rudolph Giuliani has wanted to do for years, and that a great many Manhattanites swear will happen only over their dead bodies.

Garvin was hired in 1996 as a consultant to a group trying to bring the Olympics to New York in the summer of 2008. His charge was to figure out what facilities were needed and where to put them. When the group had to give up on 2008 and turned its efforts to a bid for 2012, Garvin had time to develop his plan more fully. He decided that the key to making a New York City Olympics work was to put all the athletic facilities either along the waterfront or along a train line, so that the fifteen thousand athletes and coaches, the seventeen thousand members of the press who cover them, and most of the five hundred thousand spectators who would be expected to buy tickets could get to everything with minimal use of the city’s streets and highways. “The first issue is transportation, because we are a built-up city, and nothing works unless you figure out how to move people around,” Garvin says.

That’s easy if you are talking about a place for, say, fieldhockey, which Garvin decided to put in Columbia University’s Baker Field, on the Harlem River, or water polo, for which he wants to build a facility along the Brooklyn waterfront that could hold five thousand spectators. The real problem was where to put the main stadium. According to International Olympics Committee rules, the stadium, which is where the Olympic torch-lighting ceremonies and the major track-and-field events are held, has to seat at least eighty thousand people and have a playing area larger than a football field. It is not the sort of structure you drop casually into New York. Indeed, it might be considered antithetical to everything that New York, or at least Manhattan, stands for. New York, after all, is supposed to be the city of culture and street life, a place defined by cosmopolitan urbanity. Massive concrete sports bunkers belong next to suburban freeways. Alexander Garvin, being the sort of person who pays more attention to Verdi than to Testaverde, assumed at first that the only possible thing to do with a huge stadium was to shove it somewhere out of sight—over the Sunnyside Yards, in Queens, or near Shea Stadium.

Yet there was one place in Manhattan that a stadium might fit: the site of the sprawling Metropolitan Transportation Authority rail yards in the west thirties between Penn Station and the Hudson River. Planners and politicians have been squabbling over this piece of land, which runs from Tenth to Twelfth Avenues and from Thirtieth to Thirty-fourth Streets, for years. It is essentially a void in the middle of Manhattan. A nexus of train tunnels runs under it; it is near the Lincoln Tunnel; it is adjacent to the river; and it is no distance to speak of from Penn Station and the exploding district of Chelsea. The Starrett-Lehigh Building, the mammoth Art Moderne industrial building that has become the address of choice for new-media companies, overlooks the site on the south; the Javits Convention Center is to the north. This is a strategic piece of land. What’s strange is that it has stayed empty all these years. There has been no shortage of proposals for the site. Mayor Giuliani, after failing to engender enthusiasm for a plan to use the land for a new Yankee Stadium, floated a scheme last year to put a football stadium there, hoping to lure the New York Jets away from the New Jersey Meadowlands, even though Leon Hess, the team’s longtime owner, did not seem inclined to move his team anywhere. A decade ago, there was talk of a new Madison Square Garden on the land, and, more recently, the site loomed as a possible expansion area for the Javits Center, which looked big when it opened, in 1986, but which has now been reduced to small-time status by convention centers in other cities that are more than twice as large.

Last summer, Phyllis Lambert, the Seagram’s heiress, sponsored a lavish international design competition for the site. The finalists came up with projects that were rather fanciful and mostly unbuildable, which wasn’t surprising, since Lambert, who has been one of the great architectural patrons of modern times—she began her career by persuading her father to hire Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in the mid-nineteen-fifties—has often supported the kind of architecture that isn’t likely to make it in the marketplace. The hundred-thousand-dollar first prize went to Peter Eisenman, who has skillfully managed to sustain a reputation as architecture’s perennial radical, although his proposal in this case—an undulating park running through the site and a sports center thrust out into the river—was rather conventional.

It is curious that Lambert and her distinguished jury, which included the architects Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, and Rafael Moneo, settled so quickly for projects that exhibited a certain confusion about what seriousness and high ambition mean in this kind of situation. Most of the schemes were inventive repackagings of familiar ideas by architects who, like Eisenman, talked about shifting architectural priorities but seemed primarily interested in making new shapes, the more bent or folded the better. Cedric Price, the English architect who really is the iconoclast that Eisenman pretends to be, produced the one truly visionary project, which tried to reuse the land as a literal breathing space for the city, a cross between a park and a vast mechanical lung.

While Lambert’s jury was deliberating, Alexander Garvin was sitting in his office, trying to figure out what to do about the stadium he needed as the linchpin of his Olympics proposal. He understood quite well that nobody much liked Giuliani’s plan for a football stadium. There was not only the prospect of horrific traffic in midtown. Running a close second was the sense that putting a football stadium just below the Javits Center and a few blocks from the theatre district would be inserting an alien culture into Manhattan. If people want to pretend they are in Dallas, let them at least do it in New Jersey.

Then a couple of things happened. Joseph Rose, who is the chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and Garvin’s boss, started talking about the need to relieve pressure on the central business district; people were going to want to build more office towers in Manhattan in the next decade, Rose felt certain, and no city government would be inclined to discourage people from building them. With Times Square filling up, the towers were going to have to go somewhere. And then Leon Hess, the owner of the Jets, died, and his family put the team up for sale, raising the prospect that a new owner might have a different view about where the team should be playing.

Garvin thought about all the proposals that had been made for the site, and he wondered if the solution was not to just say yes to everything. There was enough land to build a stadium, construct a few skyscrapers and a new Madison Square Garden, have some open space, and put in a station for subway and commuter trains. All these pieces would have to be somewhat jammed together, and there wouldn’t be room for the sea of parked cars that surrounds every other football stadium, but wasn’t that the point? To figure out how to make the most un-New York thing imaginable—a huge venue for sporting events—in a New York way?

Garvin’s plan for the Olympics is based on anotion that he calls “the Olympic X.” He has drawn a big X across the five boroughs of New York. The center of the X is a site in Queens—on the East River across from the United Nations. That would be the location of the Olympic Village, where the athletes would stay. All the competitive events would be reachable from there either by water (one arm of the X) or by specially designated trains that would run on existing tracks. The arm of the X that represents the tracks goes past the rail-yards site and then on to New Jersey, where it could be extended to bring people to the athletic facilities at the Meadowlands. But the Manhattan site would be the heart of the Olympics, with the main stadium, hotels, a public square, the new Madison Square Garden, and a media center in a million-and-a-half-square-foot skyscraper that would eventually become an office tower.

The stadium plan, put together with RAN, the Toronto-based architectural firm that designed the SkyDome, calls for a retractable-roof stadium to be built on platforms over the rail yards on the section of the site between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. The stadium would have roughly eighty-five thousand seats, but when the Olympics came around in 2012, the southern end of the building would be rolled a block south on a special track, and the field expanded to Olympic size, with temporary seating added in the middle to bring the capacity to almost ninety thousand people. It would be like turning a sedan into a stretch limousine. The engineering, however bizarre it sounds, requires “simple, low-tech machinery,” according to the Olympics plan. The stadium field would be level with the Javits Center exhibition floor, so that when it was not being used for a sports event it could be opened up and used as extra exhibition space. For the eastern block, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the plan includes two hotels, the Garden, the office tower, and a seven-and-a-half-acre open square—an acre and a half bigger than Bryant Park—that would serve as a gathering place for Olympic visitors. The square is the part of the project that Garvin is proudest of, since it is what he believes would justify the intrusion of the stadium into Manhattan. “The single most important thing to remember is that this is a public realm—if you are going to make a new part of New York, you have to make some there there,” he says.

It’s a striking idea: a football stadium set on an urban square, as if it were an art museum. But is it even remotely feasible? In 1992, Camden Yards, which was inspired by classic baseball parks and is integrated into the cityscape of downtown Baltimore, changed the paradigm of baseball parks, and it has been followed by baseball fields in Cleveland and Denver that are woven even more tightly into their cities. Football, of course, is another matter: the stadiums are bigger, and they are used less often. (The Jets have a sixteen-game season, and only half the games are played at home.) But the old model of a football stadium, the concrete behemoth sitting in acres of parked cars, is as outdated as the old baseball parks. Nobody likes Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, or any of those other monoliths. They are crude attempts at monumental public architecture in the midst of suburban landscapes.

Cleveland has a new downtown football stadium, and people walk to it, but Cleveland is a tighter, less sprawling city than New York. Nevertheless, the rail-yards site is a better place than any other to test the potential of public transportation here. Garvin’s plan calls for the extension of the Flushing subway line to the site, and for a new station for Metro North trains from Westchester, which would be routed down west side tracks. The Long Island Rail Road would continue to use the rail yards underneath the site, and its trains would stop at the square. Visitors from New Jersey could come by train or by ferry. If every piece of the puzzle were put in place, the new complex would be the only site in New York that could be reached by public transportation from anywhere in the metropolitan area.

Robert Wood Johnson IV, the new owner of the Jets, has announced that he does not want to keep his team at Giants Stadium in New Jersey after its lease expires, in 2008, and he talked recently about his preference for a stadium “that would meld with the city.” Johnson has not made a decision about where to move, but his instincts seem compatible with Garvin’s. “You have to have a stadium that has multiple benefits for society as a whole,” he says. “We are a multidimensional city, and you have to relate to the neighborhoods.”

It’s doubtful that residents of Chelsea will believe that any stadium relates to their neighborhood. Joining a stadium to a city is not a natural marriage, any more than fitting a convention center smoothly into the intricate, vibrant fabric of a healthy urban place is a natural act. Chelsea is fine-grained, and mega-buildings aren’t. But are the absurd and outrageous requirements of a stadium absolutely incompatible with a city? We are better off for having the Javits Center on Eleventh Avenue rather than in the Meadowlands. The real problem isn’t the stadium, it’s the cars, and, by daring to propose a National Football League stadium without any parking, Garvin and the Olympics committee have embarked on an act of planning more radical than anything any of Phyllis Lambert’s architects dreamed of.

It may be completely unrealistic to think that the people who go to football games—a great many of whom live, work, and play in the suburbs—will be willing to abandon their cars to get to a place that they would otherwise not want to visit. They may tell the planners they know where they can shove their trains and buses and ferryboats. On the other hand, sports fans are a passionate lot, and they will put up with some inconvenience, especially if they have no choice. (And why not make the ferry shuttles free?) It’s not as though getting to Giants Stadium were a pleasure now. And once you are there, you are nowhere.

Something has to happen on the rail-yards site, and there are several reasons that the complex proposed by Garvin and the Olympics committee, which seems implausible on its face, is not completely ridiculous. It would fit in with the general opening up of the river-front on both the New York and New Jersey sides of the Hudson, it would generate jobs and income for the city, and it would encourage an interesting exchange between urban and suburban cultures. I don’t think that the city is so delicate that it would fall apart if this project were built. The question is whether it’s worth the bother, whether urbanizing a quintessentially suburban phenomenon would make New York a better place. It may be naive to think so, but it is worth pondering.