across the street from the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Skyscraper Museum. The museum would be next to a residential tower now under construction.But it has a long way to go. The museum has not raised any money beyond $2.2 million in startup funds that the state provided.

"I think enough people care about this that we'll be able to raise the money," Rollins said.

The plan grew out of a commission appointed by Pataki in 1998, the 150th anniversary of the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to develop ideas to honor women's achievements. After a year-long study and a national survey of women, the 53-member commission recommended the creation of a museum. Pataki announced the plan in April 2000. Rollins was the commission's executive director and Libby Pataki the chairwoman.

The following year, the Canal Street-based architecture firm Smith-Miller + Hawkinson won the international competition to design the building. It officially began working on the project on Sept. 10, 2001. But the events of the following day set the project back, Rollins said. "We felt that we needed everything to settle down after 9/11. People were focused on the World Trade Center site and everything else that was going on." The museum has applied to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. for a portion of the $35 million to be allocated to Downtown cultural institutions. Though the grant would be a small fraction of the needed funds, "it would make our job easier if we could show foundations and corporations that we have this gift," Rollins said. She declined to say how much the museum requested. The City Council has pledged $500,000, and Rollins hopes to get additional funding from the state. She has also talked to several corporations, she said, and the Battery Park City Authority may contribute to the project. But the museum has yet to launch a full-scale capital campaign.

Rollins said she is gearing up for it. If it is successful, she said, "at a certain point, even if we haven't raised all the money, we can begin moving forward. I don't know what that point is." When that time does come, she said, it will take about two years to finalize plans and then another two years for construction.

James Cavanaugh, president of the Battery Park City Authority, said that there is no deadline for the museum's construction. "The authority recognizes the enormous magnitude of raising this amount of money. We are willing to give the museum the time to do the job."

The museum is to lease the land from the Authority, but details have not yet been worked out, Cavanaugh said. At the same time, the museum's place on the site is not set in stone. Until a lease is drawn up and approved, he said, "the site is not officially dedicated. But the governor has conveyed to the board what he would like, and the board indicated its agreement with the governor."

It took 16 years from the time that the Museum of Jewish Heritage was conceived to its opening in 1997. David Altshuler, who was the museum's founding director from 1986 to 1999 and is now a development consultant to museums and other institutions, said launching a museum presents huge challenges.

		"If it takes a long time it shouldn't surprise anyone and shouldn't be cause for alarm," he said. "And there is enormous value in those years of preparation." The Museum of Jewish Heritage received $10 million from the Battery Park City Authority for its original building and $30 million from the city for its new wing. The women's museum exhibits would be organized along a 500-year timeline, using photos, artifacts, documents and interactive displays to show the evolution of women's roles as laws, politics and culture changed. The exhibits would explore the place of women in the family, the workplace and the community, showing how women responded to changing times.

The Leadership Center would promote leadership skills and host conferences for women from around the world. The building would also include an auditorium, conference rooms and classrooms, a library, a roof garden and a café.

The structure is designed as a glass-enclosed space inside a perforated outer shell. One corner of the glass building, which breaks through the shell, would offer views of the harbor and allow people outside to look in, said Laurie Hawkinson, who designed the building with her partner, Henry Smith-Miller, and Catherine Ingraham, an architecture professor at the Pratt Institute.

"We mapped it to relate to the view," Hawkinson said. "If the Statue of Liberty turned and looked over her left shoulder toward the building, we were interested in what she could see of us, and what we could see of her." The double skin, she added, "addresses a certain kind of interior development, with connections at the same time to the outside world."

Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm based on Pine Street, is designing the exhibits. To determine the exhibits' content, the museum is working with an advisory committee of 17 historians specializing in different areas of women's history.

Given that the museum was conceived by a Pataki-appointed commission and is being shepherded along by a Pataki advisor, questions have been raised about its political independence.

"[The governor] never said, 'This is what should be there, this is what should not be there,'" Rollins responded. "He said he thought it was a great idea and he supports it."

		Rollins said she is challenged more frequently with another question: Why is a women's museum needed? "When I go to an audience and I hear that, I ask, 'What document is the foundation of our country and who wrote it?' Everyone raises their hand. Then I ask, 'What significant document from 1848 was based on it, and who wrote it?' And nobody raises their hand. I ask a few more questions-about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and other women.

And then I always say, 'Until we can answer these questions with equal ease, our education is not complete.'"

(The 1848 document was the Declaration of Sentiments, signed at the Women's Rights Convention.)
While Rollins said that she had spoken to groups around the country, the local community knows little about it.

"You'd think they would want community involvement and engagement, that they would do some outreach, if they wanted to make this happen," said Barry Skolnick, a member of Community Board 1's Battery Park City Committee. "I couldn't even find a Web site."

The committee requested a presentation on the project's status, which Rollins said she hopes to give in March or April.

Rollins' dream for a women's history museum has been shared by others. The Women's Museum: An Institute for the Future in Dallas opened in 2000 in an existing building and cost $30 million. The National Women's History Museum in Washington, D.C., was founded in 1996 and is looking for a permanent home and $150 million in funding. The International Museum of Women, in San Francisco, began as a "museum without walls" in 1985 and is still seeking its own space.

"I would like to think that the topic is something that would energize a lot of donors," the president of the Washington museum, Susan Jollie, said in a phone interview, "and that we're not competing over small pieces of a small pie."

Rollins said she plans to be involved in the fund-raising effort, but that the board will find someone else to run the museum before it opens.

"I want to get it going as much as I can," she said. "It's something that you think, 'If I do this, I will have really helped to make something meaningful happen.'"