Las Urbanistas

The new estimate, revealed during a park board study session last week, reflects costs of the park’s updated design. The original estimate was far less than $1 billion.

The facility, which will be built on the former El Toro Marine Base, would be one of the largest urban parks in the nation.

Money for the work is expected to come from fees and taxes from the housing that will be built on the edges of the park.

“That means no new taxes for the citizens of Irvine,” said Michael Pinto, a park board member.

While demolition of the former El Toro base continues, a two-year grading project will begin by fall that will dramatically alter the landscape as workers carve out a 21-acre lake, the giant canyon and an amphitheater area.

“We won’t have buildings, but in two years we will have a complete park outlined by the grading so people can visit and picnic, hike and go bicycling,” Pinto said.

At 1,347 acres, the park will be larger than Manhattan’s 843-acre Central Park but smaller than Los Angeles’ 4,200-acre Griffith Park.

The new cost estimate reflects the design of Ken Smith, a New York landscape architect, who heads the park’s design team.

The Great Park will include a botanical garden, museums and foot bridges, athletic fields, research facilities, wildlife corridor and miles of trails.

Tethered-balloon rides are set to launch this summer, although a nearby mini-park won’t be ready for a year, officials said.

The initial phase is expected to cost about $450 million and will feature a visitor center, athletic fields, orchards and a park entrance with fountains, reflective pools, a cafe and a 300-foot-wide rectangular steel gateway.

But Yehudi Gaffen, a design team spokesman, told the park board that planning and cost estimates “will change many, many times” as the master plan evolves.

For example, the amphitheater can have a wide cost range depending on how the structure is built and the number of seats, he said.

Costs per seat can be a low $1,000 or up to $20,000, depending on the sophistication of the theater, Gaffen said. “We assumed a cost of $7,000 per seat with a 10,000-seat theater, so we embedded an estimate of $70 million.”

“At least, that’s a starting point,” he added.

The park will be at the center of a massive, 3,700-acre development by Lennar Corp., a home builder.

Lennar paid the U.S. Navy $649.5 million for the base in 2005 and then transferred land for the park to Irvine.

The developer has approval to build 3,500 homes and about 5 million square feet of commercial and retail space. It recently proposed increasing the number of homes to 9,500, which would have drastically boosted city property taxes, but then shelved that plan.

The park corporation has about $200 million in development fees from Lennar, Gaffen said. In addition, the developer has committed $201 million for roads, sewers and water infrastructure, he said.

“Our big mantra is the park will only be built with available funds … as the funds arrive,” he said.

The park’s development is not without controversy. After April’s decision by the Irvine City Council to assume authority over the park, the Orange County Grand Jury produced a critical review.

In June, the grand jury suggested the ambitious plan could founder if left in the hands of Irvine city leaders rather than a more diverse group of county residents. Irvine city leaders rejected the concern.

The grand jury recommended an elected board chosen from across the county take over the park’s development. The land had been turned over to the city after Orange County voters killed plans for an international airport, opting for park zoning.

The park board is made up of the five Irvine council members and four others, including Pinto, the founder and president of the Laguna Canyon Foundation, which led efforts to preserve Laguna Canyon.

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Great Park price

The cost of building the Great Park in Orange County will be about $1.1 billion, with the initial phase expected to cost about $450 million.

Estimated cost of building the Great Park

(in millions of dollars)

Sources: Great Park Design Studio, Orange County Great Park Corp.

Brightly painted coffins, each marked with the number of migrants who died trying to cross into the United States in various years, hang from the metal barrier separating Tijuana, Mexico, from San Diego, Calif.

TIJUANA, Mexico, Feb. 27 — Mexican authorities complained recently that American construction workers putting up a barrier on the border between Mexico and the United States had trespassed into Mexico a full 33 feet.

Luis J. Jimenez for The New York Times

At the perpetually jammed Tijuana crossing, one of the world’s busiest, cars frequently wait two hours or more to enter the United States.

The New York Times; San Diego and Tijuana are connected in a variety of ways.

Promising an investigation of the diplomatic brouhaha, the American ambassador, Antonio O. Garza Jr., reassured the Mexicans, who are livid that the barrier is going up in the first place, that any improper step across the line was unintentional. “The U.S. is sensitive to Mexican concerns,” Mr. Garza said.

The accusation involved an episode in February east of here, near the Mexican border city of Agua Prieta and the Arizona town of Douglas. But it drove home a point that might be more evident in Tijuana than anywhere else: the border is a blurry one, no matter what barriers may be going up to keep people from illegally crossing it.

A case in point is Kurt Honold Morales, a citizen and resident of both countries, who drives his Mercedes sports utility vehicle with California plates around Tijuana, where he works.

Mr. Honold, a 46-year-old telecommunications executive, recently became the mayor of Tijuana, when the elected mayor resigned to run for governor and Mr. Honold, a business associate and the mayor’s No. 2, stepped in to fill the unexpired term.

“We’re connected, border or no border,” Mr. Honold said, noting that his children go to San Diego schools and that his family has held season tickets for the San Diego Chargers for more than 30 years.

On a host of issues, there is no separating San Diego, the largest city along the border, from Tijuana, the biggest municipality on the Mexican side.

They are linked economically, with Tijuana’s assembly plants, or maquiladoras, helping to fuel growth on both sides of the border. High home prices in San Diego have pulled up Tijuana’s real estate as well.

When it comes to the environment, it is difficult to say where Mexico ends and the United States begins. Air pollution knows no borders, and heavy rains in Tijuana send sewage and industrial waste down the Tijuana River into the United States.

A former congressman once used a bulldozer to try to push sewage back to Mexico, but that was no permanent fix. For years, an American-financed sewage treatment plant on the Tijuana side has been considered the best solution, although now support is increasing for a plant to process waste on the American side.

There are other cross-border irritants. When San Diego announced that it was replacing a leaky section of the canal that carries water into the city from the Colorado River, Mexicans complained loudly because their farmers had been irrigating their crops with the leakage for decades.

Mr. Honold, whose German-Mexican father was born in San Diego, is hardly the only person whose life straddles the border.

There is Elisa R. Peñaloza-Aguirre, also a dual citizen, who teaches in a San Diego elementary school but moved to Tijuana a year ago for the lower home prices and so that her children would become fluent in Spanish as well as English.

“There are tons of people who commute back and forth,” said Ms. Peñaloza-Aguirre, one of 88,252 regular crossers who have a special American pass that allows them to use a fast lane at the California-Mexico border.

There is metal border fencing running the length of Tijuana, but that does not stop people from trying to poke holes in the barriers, both literally and figuratively.

For years, the San Diego-Tijuana Border Initiative, a binational antidrug organization, held its meetings right at the fence, with American members sitting on chairs on their side and their Mexican colleagues on the other. “The drug problem does not stop at the border,” said Veronica Baeza, the group’s executive director.

But American authorities soured on the meetings after Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Baeza said. Now the sessions are rotated between the cities, though Mexicans without visas cannot attend the ones in San Diego.

It is hard to find a Mexican who supports the barriers going up along the border. Many are offended by such an approach, even those like Tijuana’s mayor, who will be able to cross back and forth no matter how high the walls are built.

On the other hand, Representative Duncan Hunter , a Republican who represents part of the San Diego area and is a candidate for president, has said building a wall between Mexico and the United States will be among his highest priorities if he wins. One of his campaign advisers, Lois Eargle, a county official in South Carolina, recently boasted about the advice she gave an illegal immigrant seeking legal aid for an abused child.

“I told her the best thing for her to do was to get back to Mexico,” Ms. Eargle said.

Luis Ituarte, a third-generation Tijuanan who lives in Tijuana half the week and Los Angeles the other half, has a much more relaxed view of the border.

Just recently, his Border Council of Arts and Culture rented a house in Tijuana just a few steps from the border to use as a cultural center. Recently, it was the site of a cross-border poetry reading. Using bullhorns, poets from Mexico and the United States recited their work from their respective countries.

“Air doesn’t need a passport,” Mr. Ituarte said. “Light doesn’t need a passport. Art should not need a passport either.”

Mr. Ituarte, who is a citizen of Mexico and permanent resident of the United States, chose the site of the cultural center not just for its proximity to the border. The house was seized by Mexican authorities several years ago when it was discovered that drug traffickers had dug a hole in the concrete floor and a tunnel that crossed under the border to a parking lot in San Ysidro, Calif.

“What better place to try to connect two cultures,” he said. “We want to break this wall in a subliminal way, if we can’t break it physically.”

In 1923, John W. Campbell, a millionaire American financier, built a big corner office resembling a 13th-century Florentine palazzo, a whim not unusual in the age of Gatsby, save for the whim’s location.

James Estrin/The New York Times
Workers peeled back carpet early Sunday in the Campbell Apartment, an office-turned-bar in Grand Central Terminal.

James Estrin/The New York Times
Just before the bar opened Sunday, the owner, Mark Grossich, right, gave last-minute instructions to Matthew Hartzog, a designer.

Mr. Campbell chose Grand Central Terminal. There, in a hide-in-plain-sight corner only steps away from commuters pouring onto Vanderbilt Avenue, he built his ground-floor office in a space the size of a chapel.

It had a butler, a pipe organ, a library and one of the world’s largest Persian rugs. After Mr. Campbell’s death in 1957, the space fell into peculiar times, including a stint as a jail.

Not until 1999 was it restored and renovated into a lush saloon of dark wood, dim lamps and Jazz Age cocktails now known as the Campbell Apartment.

Last year, Mark Grossich, who restored the leased space and owns the bar, decided the place was getting threadbare and needed Nina Campbell, an interior designer in London, to spruce it up. In less than 12 hours, they would do everything, to avoid closing for even a night.

Yesterday, a platoon of workers labored morning to afternoon to refashion the Campbell Apartment into something still agreeably old but almost entirely new.

Ms. Campbell, who is not related to the American financier, is known for designing the interiors of Annabel’s club in London and the Hotel le Parc in Paris.

When she first saw the Campbell Apartment about a year ago, she recalled, she was stunned. “I came in the doorway and I said, ‘Oh, my God, what is this, Pandora’s box?’

“Then I began thinking of Anna Karenina and train stations and steam and illicit meetings.” She added, “Luckily for me, the upholstery needed attention.”

Ms. Campbell’s strategy was to replace a largely blue palette with a largely red one — to lay new carpet, banquettes, bar stools and chairs, and brighten it all with red, much like turning up the color on a television set.

The 1999 restoration of the Campbell Apartment cost more than $1.5 million and the current makeover more than $350,000, Mr. Grossich said.

The breakneck renovation, months in the planning, began at dawn yesterday. Under the 25-foot ceiling, union workers being paid double overtime hauled away old tables, chairs and sofas, and then peeled away the carpet.

Shuffling along on knee pads, they scraped away sheets of carpet adhesive, stuck like fried egg on a pan, as well as the remains of countless spilled martinis.

The new designer furniture left Hickory, N.C., on Friday morning and with luck and clear skies would be rumbling into Manhattan in time for the beefy workers to arrange it just so.

As it happens, the new red furniture arrived a bit late, but serendipitously so, at 3:45 p.m. The furniture workers arrived just as the carpet workers were leaving.

A last-minute glitch: Some of the furniture was too big for Grand Central’s single doors. But employees at the restaurant next door, Cipriani Dolci, let the big furniture caravan its way through their double doors.

By 5:53 p.m., barely 12 hours start to finish, the makeover was complete, the maître d’s lectern in place, and a beaming couple from out of town were the first customers of the evening.

“I like the idea that it’s rather grand,” said Edwin Foster, 53, a music director from Boonton, N.J., who was visiting the Campbell Apartment for the first time.

“And a piece of old New York,” added his friend Judith Stuss, 57.

There is no evidence that John Williams Campbell wrote letters or kept diaries. To Allyn Freeman, who is writing a book about the Campbell Apartment, personal facts about him are almost as scarce as those about Shakespeare.

But what facts there are are choice. Mr. Campbell, who resembled Warren G. Harding, favored Savile Row tailoring but disliked wearing socks, even with shoes, said Mr. Grossich and Mr. Freeman, who have spoken about him with Elsie Fater, his niece. He liked unwrinkled trousers, so he hung his in a humidor, while he worked untrousered at a desk.

Mr. Campbell was born in 1880, the son of John Campbell, the treasurer of Credit Clearing House, a credit-reference firm specializing in the garment industry. The younger Campbell had a sister and an older brother. The family lived on Cumberland Avenue, in the affluent Brooklyn neighborhood known as The Hill, now called Fort Greene.

There is no record of the younger Mr. Campbell attending college. He started work at 18 at his father’s firm, where he became a senior executive at 25 and later president.

In 1920, he was appointed to the board of New York Central Railroad, where he would have crossed paths with William K. Vanderbilt Jr., the railroad scion whose office was in Grand Central Terminal.

By this time, Mr. Campbell was prosperous enough to have workmen come from Tiffany & Company to polish his silver. His wife, the former Rosalind D. Casanave, nicknamed Princess, was once listed in The New York Times as a “patroness” of a “Monte Carlo party and dance” at the Ardsley Country Club at Ardsley-on-Hudson.

Sometime in 1923, he commissioned Augustus N. Allen to build an office in leased space in Grand Central Terminal. Mr. Allen was an architect known for designing Long Island estates and grand offices.

Mr. Campbell filled his new office with Italian furniture, a pipe organ, a piano and a steel safe inside a large stone fireplace. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen. Mr. Campbell had a butler there named Stackhouse.

Perhaps the most striking piece was a Persian rug that covered nearly the entire floor, which is the length of a subway car. It was said to have cost $300,000, or roughly $3.5 million in today’s money.

After Mr. Campbell’s death, it was unclear what happened to the rug and other furnishings, Mr. Freeman said. The space became a signalman’s office and later a closet, where the transit police stored guns and other equipment. It also became a small jail, in the area of the present-day bar.

As for the name Campbell Apartment, that is a misnomer, according to Mr. Freeman. People assumed that such a baronial space was an apartment.

While there was a couch in the office, there was no bed. Mr. Campbell and his wife lived a few blocks away at 270 Park Avenue, not far from the Waldorf-Astoria. There was no need to sleep in the office overnight, Mr. Freeman said.

And for the record, there is no record, or rumor, of dalliance on Mr. Campbell’s part in what must have been one of the city’s great stages for assignation. Not one chorine, hat-check girl or taxi dancer?

” ‘Fraid not,” Mr. Freeman said.