A phalanx of notable civic, business, political, and cultural figures is expected to attend the funeral of Brooke Astor, the society doyenne whose benevolence brightened the city. A spokeswoman for St. Thomas Church confirmed that the funeral was scheduled for Friday at 2:30 p.m. but said it was unclear whether the service would be open to the public.

Astor, who cut a swath through society and donated a fortune to charity, died Monday at 105.

“This week, thousands of New Yorkers are going to say farewell to this wonderful woman, who was the people’s philanthropist,” the president of the Alliance for the Arts, Randall Bourscheidt, said. “There is no room large enough to hold all the people whose lives she touched.”

A spokesman for the police department, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said, “The precinct will have resources to anticipate” a large crowd.

Astor inspired an enormous public respect across generations, the founder of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, David Patrick Columbia, said. He predicted a large turnout at the funeral and said it would be hard to keep the public out. St. Thomas, a limestone building designed in 1916 by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, is “among the most sophisticated essays in medieval Gothic design in America,” a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University, Andrew Dolkart, said.

Mr. Columbia, a society observer, speculated that those offering remarks might include a former president of the New York Public Library, Vartan Gregorian, the library’s current president, Paul LeClerc, or Mayor Bloomberg. Asked whether the mayor would be attending or speaking, a spokesman said he had no comment.

The Episcopal service will likely include hymns that Astor liked, a person close to the family said. Attorneys for Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, confirmed that Astor would be buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Irvington, N.Y. In a statement, Mr. Marshall said his mother was “one-of-a-kind in every way” and that her tombstone would be inscribed with words she specifically requested: “I had a wonderful life.” A historian at Columbia University, Kenneth Jackson, said that among the largest funeral crowds in New York were those for President Grant in 1885 and Rudolph Valentino in 1926. Sholom Aleichem also drew an enormous crowd in 1916.

The New York Public Library also is planning a celebration of Astor’s life in September, spokeswoman Gayle Snible said, but she added that no other details are yet available.

A large group at the Park Avenue Armory celebrated Astor’s 90th birthday, and a smaller dinner at the Rockefeller family’s estate in Pocantico Hills marked her 100th birthday.

“She was a wonderful person who was important in the survival of New York in its difficult years” in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Jackson said. The turnaround at the New York Public Library, in which she was a principal force, took place before the turnaround of the city itself, he said.

In 1953, she married Vincent Astor, the son of John Jacob Astor IV. Public interest in this family endures: The New York Herald of April 2, 1848, reported that the body of Vincent Astor’s greatgreat-grandfather, the fur trader John Jacob Astor, lay in state in the house of his son William B. Astor in Lafayette Place and “thousands rushed in until the hall was crowded almost to suffocation.” And the public historian at the New-York Historical Society, Kathleen Hulser, said a diary in the society’s collection from a mayor of New York, Philip Hone, recorded in 1848: “The occasion caused great excitement and the curiosity of the people was intense.”