The High Line gala: Bowie plans a Manhattan Meltdown

The hot ticket in Manhattan this week is a private party on Wednesday night at the Buddha Bar in the West Village. David Bowie will be there with a few of his show-biz buddies such as Ricky Gervais, fresh in from London, and Laurie Anderson.

Music will pump, cheeks will glow and the designer martinis on the bar will be outnumbered only by the queuing throngs on the wrong side of the velvet rope outside. This will not, however, be just one more of those paparazzi-mobbed Gotham nights, conceived to promote another brand of vodka or fashion line.

When the glasses are raised it will be to toast two things at once: a 10-day arts binge in New York of which Mr Bowie is the celebrity curator and, though slightly more tenuously, the emergence of a whole new neighbourhood, after which it is named.

The two men at the party wearing the widest grins - hopefully from relief and not panic - will be David Binder, a theatre producer in New York and London, and his business partner Josh Wood. This was their idea and finally it has arrived: the first night of the first-ever New York High Line Festival, which, if all goes well, will become part of the city's cultural calendar each May for years into the future.

This night, moreover, will have been more than two years in the making. It was in early in 2005, when the pair came to the same realisation. While Europeans cannot count their summer arts festivals on two hands and feet, New York, for all its cultural prowess, was oddly bereft. It was time that changed.

"I was completely influenced by the art circuit in Europe," says Binder, who has produced several shows at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, London, such as Voyage Round my Father and Guys and Dolls with Ewan McGregor. He is also one of the producers behind Frost/Nixon now on Broadway. "We don't have that sort of thing here." True, there are annual festivals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and Lincoln Centre, but those "are much more high culture and this is more popular culture".

A venture such as this - the festival ranges from comedy stand-up (Gervais) to performance art (Anderson) as well as photography, rock concerts and film - is risky business. As Binder points out sipping coffee one day last week outside a café on Sixth Avenue, there is no Arts Council here with dollars to dole out. Everything must come from ticket sales - the omens so far look good - and from corporate sponsorship. "It's very tight. Even if we sell every single ticket to every event we would still be short."

But it was London, especially, that originally gave Binder and Wood the inspiration. Specifically, Binder has over the years watched the city put on two unique arts festivals of its own, both driven by artists rather than by august art institutions. One is the Meltdown music programme, which happens around the Royal Festival Hall each summer and the other is Lift, the London International Festival of Theatre, which brings plays and other performance works to venues all around the capital city.

Binder and Wood are trying for a festival that will take elements from both the London models. They decided that like Meltdown, the High Line would have a different celebrity curator each year. "I want to see how it is when it is the Jay-Z festival or the Dolly Parton festival, the Bob Dylan festival or the Pedro Almodovar festival," Binder explains. And from Lift they took the notion of geography, choosing interesting venues for the festival that Gotham dwellers would otherwise not be familiar with.

They were helped along by two early breaks. Binder knew that Bowie, who lives in lower Manhattan, had once curated Meltdown and so approached him about being their guy for the first High Line. He wrote a letter with the proposal and it was while he was on holiday in Zagreb two summers ago that he got a phone call from Bowie's manager. Yes, was the reply, he would be glad to do it. Once on board, Bowie agreed that the festival should boast some marquee names, such as Gervais, but also some new and emerging talents. "I would really hope that the exposure this festival affords will help these folk get the attention they deserve," Bowie said in a statement last week.

Clearly, having Bowie, who has a broad network of friends in all corners of the art world, was a boon. To those who say attaching the rock icon's name to the festival looks like a gimmick, Binder nods but adds that Bowie is a gimmick with substance. He has been behind attracting most of the featured artists and will be cheerleading events through the 10 days although he said from the start he would not perform. "This is his thing right now, this is what he is doing," says Binder. "It's his party, he's hosting."

Meanwhile, they wanted their festival to be anchored to a particular pocket of Manhattan. Both men were intrigued by plans that were just beginning to blossom two years ago to save a 1.45-mile-long stretch of elevated and abandoned rail track and turn it into a park, 30 foot in the sky. Threading its way through former industrial buildings and warehouses near the Hudson river from West Chelsea in the West 30s down the Meatpacking District, this is the High Line. Once they had settled on the area, the two men took out their bikes and begun scouting for potential venues.

They were being cleverer then they thought. In the two years since, the High Line has emerged as one of the sexiest and most innovative urban renewal projects that Manhattan has ever seen.

It has come about largely because of the efforts of a local network of activists who formed the Friends of the High Line, which began by suing the city after its then mayor, Rudy Giuliani, decided to demolish the rusting hulk, which hadn't seen a train on its tracks since 1980. That battle won, they launched a competition for architects to figure out what to do with it. Proposals included turning it into a nearly endless lap swimming pool on stilts. What won favour was creating a park, a ribbon of green grass and trees, accessible to pets and lit at night, floating above the Manhattan streetscape.

While galleries, clubs, edgy boutiques and loft conversions began to multiply up and down the High Line some years ago, the putative park has now sparked an explosion of architectural ambition. Among star names behind several dazzling projects are the likes of Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Robert Stern. Andre Balazs, the celebrity hotelier, is already well into the construction of a Standard Hotel on West 13th Street that will literally straddle the High Line. An apartment tower proposed for Eleventh Avenue nearby even features a unique, not to say over-the-top, lift system that will allow residents to bring their cars up to docking decks directly outside each of the units.

In one regard, the festival's name might seem misleading. None of the events will be taking place on the High Line itself, not least because its transformation is not done yet. Indeed, some of the venues are not even that close to it, for instance Radio City Music Hall, where the rock group Arcade Fire will play this Wednesday, or the Quad Cinema, which will host a retrospective of 10 Latin American and Spanish films from the past 100 years, all picked by Bowie and kicking off with a screening of the 1919 Mexican classic El Automovil Gris (The Grey Automobile) with actors on stage beneath the screen to overlay sound. Gervais, doing stand-up for the first time in the United States, has already sold out all 6,000 seats at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden. The group Air will be playing at the same venue on Thursday.

Some of the action will be much nearer the tracks, however, including a multi-media presentation of the work of French surrealist photographer Claude Cahun in the gardens of a theological seminary that takes up an entire block in the shadow of the High Line on Tenth Avenue. Choosing the seminary fitted exactly with what Binder liked most about Lift in London - its focus on exploiting unexpected locales for art. "I must have walked by it 7,000 times in my life," he says, "but I had never been into it."

A water tower, meanwhile, atop a building on West 14th Street that is the home of Friends of the High Line - the organisation will receive 5 per cent of the revenue from festival ticket sales - will serve every day from dusk 'til midnight as the screen for the underwater video art of Laurie McCleod. It will show Chinese artist Luo Yong Wang performing dreamlike sequences, including a segment on a bicycle, under water. For McCleod, who captured the movements of Luo under the surface of a local swimming pool, the connection between the festival and the High Line is perfect. The creation of the park-in-the-sky is an undertaking beyond what she thought New York was capable of. "I am so thrilled, because I am a true fan of the vision of the High Line itself. I am stunned the park is actually happening. If it was Berlin or Paris, of course, but for New York to pull it off? Please. So it's amazing."

With 10 days to prove itself, the High Line Festival could be set to emerge as a fixture on New York's cultural landscape as energising and unexpected as the old railway line it celebrates.