With the plans for a performing arts center at the former World Trade Center site floundering, members of Lower Manhattan’s cultural community are focusing on plotting an initiative to free up more space downtown for cultural activities.

The chairwoman of Community Board 1, Julie Menin, is asking for a grant of $250,000 from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to identify underutilized spaces in Lower Manhattan to convert into areas for dance, the visual arts, the performing arts, and other cultural activities. This “cultural master plan,” as Ms. Menin calls it, would also encourage private developers to allocate spaces in their buildings for the arts, and would attempt to fill the hole the stalled performing arts center has left behind.

At a board meeting today, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the former World Trade Center site, is expected to address delays associated with the performing arts center. Fund raising for the performing arts center has not started, and construction cannot begin until after a transit hub for PATH trains is completed, which could be four or five years away. Last April, a proposal that the performing arts center be built on top of the Fulton Street Transit Center was met with criticism.

In 2004, Governor Pataki said the performing arts center would be “a vibrant mixture of dance, theater, and fine arts” that would draw “millions” of visitors. Four artistic institutions were chosen from more than 100 applicants seeking space at the site, and architect Frank Gehry was chosen to design it. Now, only one cultural tenant remains: the Joyce Theater, a dance institution.

Ms. Menin, who is also an LMDC board member, said the cultural master plan would focus on converting places such as Pier A in the Battery, the former Fulton Fish Market, and the nearby Tin Building into new cultural space.

“In the absence of movement on the performing arts center, I felt very strongly that we need to do as much as possible to increase the arts presence in Lower Manhattan,” Ms. Menin, who reportedly will make a bid for a City Council seat in 2009, said.

The local City Council member, Alan Gerson, who is term-limited out of office in 2009, said a performing arts center must go forward, but it might have to be relocated and reconfigured.

“We’re in regular contact with Julie and CB1, and we’re going to work with them” on the cultural master plan, he said yesterday.

Lower Manhattan has one of the fastest-growing populations in New York City, and with the amount of residential and commercial construction under way in the area, residents are worried that cultural space will lose out.

“Who knows what’s going to happen with the World Trade Center site? I think people really were expecting the performing arts center, but I think it’s very, very important to start thinking short-term and long-term,” the founder of the arts consulting company Beckelman+Capalino, Laurie Beckelman, said.

“You know it’s a small piece of real estate down here,” a spokeswoman for the Drawing Center, Lisa Gold, said. The organization was slated to move into the performing arts center until 2005, and is now looking for somewhere downtown after a location near the South Street Seaport fell through.

Representatives from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council would not comment on the downtown cultural space crunch.

A spokesman for the LMDC, Michael Murphy, said the corporation approves millions of dollars for cultural activities a year, but that he could not comment on Ms. Menin’s grant application until he had seen it.