Today the board of the Hudson River Park Trust, a joint city and state organization, is set to decide the fate of Pier 40, a parking lot and some playing fields near West Houston Street in Manhattan. The pier has been generating 40% of the 550-acre park’s $6 million in annual revenue, but it requires repairs that are estimated to run about $280 million. One of the city’s most active developers, the Related Companies, has proposed to build on the pier a $600 million complex, including a permanent home to Cirque du Soleil, a space for the TriBeCa film festival, and rooftop athletic fields. They are offering to pay $5 million in rent a year to the Trust, and rehab the pier. But some wealthy neighborhood residents have recently banded together to derail that plan, and they propose raising private funds to rehab the pier, create rental space for artists, and “keep a park a park.” They have dubbed the Related Companies’s project “Vegas on the Hudson.”

In one sense this kind of contretemps follows from the changing nature of the riverfront in Manhattan. For decades, visitors to Manhattan could come and go without ever realizing they were on an island. The waterfront was walled off from the heart of the city by working piers and a busy, wrap-around highway. The loss of the city’s manufacturing sector and the rise of big competing ports, not to mention airlines, has led to the residential development of on the waterfront. It is hard to think of any area in the city where the transformation has been more startling than along the West Side from Battery Park to 57th Street, i.e., the area incorporated since 1998 as Hudson River Park. Some of us may pine for the days of bustling commerce on the waterfront, but it’s hard to deny the charms of what has arisen in its place.

Yet there is a sense that much of the opposition to the Related Companies’s plan, as well as the animating force of the alternative proposed by the neighborhood, has to do with the desire of West Village residents to preserve their neighborhood as, in effect, a gated-community for the wealthy. Or with a tactic designed to stall any development. That in and of itself isn’t immoral or even wrong. But it would become a claim against the rest of the city if the residents were to fail, in this economic climate, to raise the money to rehabilitate the pier. Then the city would be trapped into bearing the cost of upgrading a site that the Related Companies would undertake. Related’s proposal may be a gaudy, awkward fit for the low-slung neighborhood and more of a tourist attraction than a contribution to the city’s arts scene. It, however, has the best chance of paying for itself without the use of public funds, and drawing an estimated 2.7 million people a year to the city’s waterfront.