Noreen Doyle, executive vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, told the Waterfront and Park Committee of Community Board 4 last night that a decision has not been made yet on which venture will be awarded the rights to develop Pier 57 between 15th and 16th Streets in Chelsea, but said that the board of her organization had voted to recommend that the State Legislation expand the lease term for the venture that would develop Pier 40 at Houston Street in the West Village.

Pier 57 was built in 1954 for Grace Lines. After W. R. Grace Company sold its shipping line in 1969, the pier, which is just to the south of the Chelsea Piers complex, was used as a bus garage and maintenance facility by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

In 2005, the trust selected a proposal by a joint venture of the Witkoff Group, Plaza Construction and Giuseppe Cipriani to develop the pier into a fashion emporium with shops, a marina and restaurants and a 70,000-square-foot "event space." The project was known as "Leonardo" and would also have included a rooftop club and a community educational facility and a floating swimming barge and possibly a bridge from the rooftop park to the High Line elevated park. The Witkoff Group eventually pulled out of the project and the Trust issued a new "request for proposals" last summer.

The proposals that were presented in February were from The Related Companies, the Durst Organization and C & K Properties, and YoungWoo & Associates.

The Related proposal included "robotic" parking, a food hall marketplace, and a promenade encircling the pier. Elkus Mandredi Architects is Related's architectural firm for the project and Field Operations is the landscape architect.

The 60-page proposal by Durst and C & K Properties maintained that "Manhattan still lacks a waterfront attraction comparable to Chicago's Navy Pier." "Hudson Gardens @ Pier 57" will become "an iconic part of the city's waterfront" with various sail-like fabric elements, "exotic building structures." "unique nightlife" and the Children's Museum of Manhattan. Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn architects are the project designers.

YoungWoo & Associates recently built the nearby Chelsea Arts Tower and is constructing the 16-story residential condominium building where most apartments incorporate a room to garage a car at 200 Eleventh Avenue and it just entered a contract to buy the former Cities Service skyscraper from A.I.G. at 70 Pine Street in Lower Manhattan.

According to its 86-page proposal, one of the project's major tenants will be Urban Space Management USA, which has created indoor and outdoor retail facilities at Grand Central Terminal, and Union Square and numerous other locations. Other major tenants are Phillips de Pury & Company, the auction house, and the TriBeCa Film Festival. LOT-EK, which is headed by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, is the design architect for the project.

At Pier 40, the trust passed a resolution last month to ask the State Legislature to extend the lease term under consideration from 30 years to 49 years, according to Ms. Doyle,

The 800-foot-square, three-level, former shipping pier needs considerable repairs.

Last year, The Related Companies said its plan for a Cirque du Soleil facility and movie theaters on the pier could not be financed under a 30-year-lease and that it needed a 49-year-lease. Its proposals met with opposition from some Greenwich Village residents concerned about traffic generation and the loss of the pier's soccer fields and parking spaces.

The Trust issued another request for proposals but then rejected, according to an article by Lincoln Anderson in this week's edition of The Villager, "a lower-impact, community-friendly collaboration by the Pier 40 Partnership and Urban Dove/CampGroup, featuring two or three public high schools and possibly a new private high school. The Trust believed this last proposal's financials would not work."