“I think about him all the time,” Maura Moynihan said, before taking another tiny sip from her glass of pinot noir. “He was an amazing New Yorker.”

The man she was talking about wasn’t her father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator. Ms. Moynihan was having an Alexander Hamilton moment, and she put a $10 bill face up on the table for easy ogling.

“We’ll do an Alexander Hamilton session sometime,” she said. “I have to sit you down and give you my whole presentation about why he’s the only Founding Father you have to be really obsessed with. His grave is at Trinity Church. Let’s go to his gravesite!”

Maura Moynihan wears her passions on her sleeve, which couldn’t have hurt her fight for Moynihan Station, her father’s pet cause, which she took on after his death in 2003. The $818 million station would serve riders of the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, and perhaps Amtrak. People say Ms. Moynihan brought a face to the fight for it, but to reduce her to a face would be missing the point. Even her face is more than a face: It’s an instrument of high drama, with an expression that’s perpetually in flux. She can look happy, surprised, sad, or sultry – but never bored.

She was looking positively delighted at the press conference last week at which Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, and the chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, Charles Gargano, announced the choice of developers to convert the old Farley Post Office into the train station her father had envisioned. Even in the shadow of the black umbrella she was using to block out the scorching sun, Ms. Moynihan was the star of the event, a small-boned, red-haired knockout in a kimono-style shirt and a cache of Tibetan jewelry.

Maura Moynihan is many things: painter; writer; beauty; poet; single mother; speaker of Tibetan, Hindi, and Urdu; standup comic; charmer; screenwriter; defender of Tibetan refugees; Democratic fund-raiser; lifelong yoga practitioner; muse of the pop artist Andy Warhol’s; ballet lover; hostess; enthusiastic disco dancer; rabble-rouser.

At the press conference, all the speakers addressed “Maura” – except Mr. Bloomberg, who spoke to a “Moira.”

Asked if she thought there was a correlation between the recent rejection of the Jets stadium in the West 30s and the sudden green-lighting of Moynihan Station in the same neighborhood, a glowing Ms. Moynihan responded: “There’s definitely more energy out there. Ask the astrologer how this all happened.

“Oh – hi, baby,” she called out to a friend, an important-looking government official who was mounting the steps of the post office. She waved at him as if he were a long-lost child, and her silver bangles chinkled as they crashed against one other.

“She’s not your standard business type lobbyist,” the director of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Manhattan office, Linda Rosenthal, said. She met with Ms. Moynihan a few months ago.

“She’s very opinionated and she doesn’t mince words,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “She was not going to let this project stagnate.”

As a boy growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Pat Moynihan shined shoes and hawked papers in the old Penn Station. Its 1962 dismantling broke his heart, and in 1993, he secured the appropriation of about $800 million in federal funds to convert the Farley building into an elegant train station and retail hub. Following her father’s death, three years after he left the Senate, Ms. Moynihan wrote a letter to Mr. Pataki beseeching him to keep her father’s plan going. Mr. Pataki responded with a letter that Ms. Moynihan calls “beautiful,” and he and Mr. Gargano are the men whom she credits most for last week’s good news.

In her years pressing for the project, even during the presidential campaign when nobody really cared about a train station, she persevered, spending her days on the phone, appearing on TV, working as a consultant with the Regional Planning Association, writing editorials, setting up meetings with the city’s power players, and checking in regularly with Senators Schumer and Clinton, both longtime supporters of the plan.

This May, Ms. Moynihan organized a fund-raising event at the Farley-building. Mr. Bloomberg and the New York senators were keynote speakers, and a drink called the Moynihan Station was invented for the occasion.

“I just tried to keep it from dying,” Ms. Moynihan said. “I tried to make them remember it was there.”

Moynihan Station will occupy the 1.4 million square feet of the now-vacant James A. Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, across the street from Penn Station, which Ms. Moynihan calls a “pit under a basketball court.” The new station has had few opponents, though some Republicans in Congress tried, unsuccessfully, last year to rescind some of the federal funds that had been set aside for the project.

Proponents of the new station say it will not only spur New York’s economy with the creation of 10,000 temporary and 3,300 full-time jobs, but also redress the great crime of 1962. The stadium has been touted in addition as a national security measure, as it will have 33 exits, in contrast to Penn Station, where it often takes commuters 10 minutes to make it from their train to the street.

“You walk in there,” Ms. Moynihan said of the current terminal for the Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak, “and you’re taking your life in your hands. All you need is one pipe bomb in the Krispy Kreme and it’s all over.”

The executive vice president of the Regional Planning Association, Thomas K. Wright, has been advocating the plan for several years, and he worked with Ms. Moynihan over the past year.

“It was her coming on the scene that picked things up,” he said. “She’s terrific, very persuasive, because she’s so dedicated to this project. When people talk to her, they feel as if they’re hearing her father talk.”

One of Ms. Moynihan’s best friends, Wilson Kidde, whom she met through Warhol in the early 1980s, said: “I think her gadfly role has been instrumental in getting it off the ground. She made sure that it got ink. For a long time it was overshadowed by the stadium and nobody was paying attention.”

Her flair for the dramatic can’t have hurt, either. Ms. Moynihan seems to be genetically incapable of delivering a sentence flatly. As members of the media swarmed around her after the press conference, she could be overheard rattling off such phrases as “an act of urbancide” and “the only office I’m running for is mayor of Moynihan Station,” in her made-for-the-stage voice.

When she agreed to go out for drinks with The New York Sun, Ms. Moynihan wanted to meet first at a NoLita boutique specializing in Tibetan clothing. Between wrapping handmade scarves around her face and trying on a fur hat for fun, she gave the store’s proprietor a packet of printouts about volunteering for Tibetan refugees to pass on to his daughter. “Okay,” she said to the reporter when she was ready. “How about a daiquiri?”

Maura Moynihan was born 48 years ago yesterday in Albany, where her father was working as an aide to Governor Harriman. When she was 5, her family moved to Washington, D.C., when her father went to work in the Kennedy administration as assistant secretary of labor.

“I never met him, but I saw him as a child,” she said of the slain president, adopting the love-struck tone she also uses for Hamilton. “He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The Moynihan family resettled on the campus of Harvard, where Pat Moynihan taught. They lived down the street from John Kenneth Galbraith, who at age 96 still lives in Cambridge. Ms. Moynihan plans to visit him later this week. “He’s my mentor and my friend,” she said. “What a wonderful friend. Oh! Ninety-six! He’s 96! In Asia, you are taught that you must always spend time with your elders. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because you’ll learn from your elders. I love that about Asian culture. They would never put someone in an old age home.”

As a kid, Maura Moynihan played the part of the socially conscious Cambridge child of the ’60s, with the requisite long hair worn with a center part, and the requisite fondness for the Beatles.

“I remember when the Sergeant Pepper album was released in fall of ’68, all the Harvard intellectuals decided to embrace the Beatles as being geniuses,” Ms. Moynihan said. “My dad listened to them, too, but he really loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When he was elected to the Senate in ’82, the first call of congrats came from Ginger Rogers. He loved that! That was his dream girl! I’d forgotten that!”

President Nixon appointed her father ambassador to India when she was 15, and the family moved to New Delhi, which she says she knew she loved the minute she stepped off the plane. “I smelled it, I smelled in India,” she said. “It’s my favorite country in the world. It’s a very civilized country.”

Ms. Moynihan returned to America to pursue Eastern studies at Harvard. Her roommate was Mandy Grunwald, now a powerful Democratic political consultant, who is still a good friend, but she says she didn’t have the time of her life at Harvard.

She had just graduated from college when she met Warhol at the New York disco Xenon, and she went on to work for his magazine and television show for five years.

Her next phase found her in India and Tibet, working as an advocate for Tibetan refugees. “I know Tibet became chic in the ’90s. There was this moment when everyone was going to Free Tibet concerts,” Ms. Moynihan said. “But for many years, Tibetans lived in obscurity and deep poverty, and I had known them in that period, so for me it was never a fad.” She stuck out her arm to show a thick silver bracelet she bought from a Tibetan woman 31 years ago and has worn every day since.

It was during that period that she met the writer John Avedon, son of the photographer Richard Avedon. They married, had a son, and divorced a year later.

For a brief while, she and her then-1-year-old son moved in with her parents in Washington and she worked at the press office of the Holocaust Museum. “It was a hard time,” Ms. Moynihan said. “In D.C., you don’t get invited places if you’re a single mom.”

In the 1990s she wrote screenplays, one of which she sold to Oliver Stone, whom she met in Tibet.

“I made a ton of money,” she said. “I did it to support my fiction writing, which has always been my dream.”

Now she gets invited to plenty of parties. She lives with her son in an apartment in Stuyvesant Town, where she’s known for putting on parties of her own. During the presidential election, she threw homemade fund-raising events for Senator Kerry nearly every week.

“She’s made an art out of life,” her friend Wilson Kidde said. “You’ll go to her parties and you’ll run into everyone from a Grateful Dead songwriter to a Tibetan monk to Moby.”

Now that the Moynihan Station seems to be on course, she’s focusing on finishing up the final edits of “Covergirl: Reality Fiction,” a novel due out from publisher Judith Regan’s imprint Regan Books later this year. Then she’ll be then taking off to Thailand, where she’s going to spend a month writing and painting and otherwise catching her breath.

And yet, the fight for the station isn’t over. An Environmental Impact Statement has to be submitted and approved, and, of course, anything can happen. “I’ll be worried,” Maura Moynihan said, “until I hear the sound of jackhammers.”