Last week I had the good fortune (finally) to take a bike ride around Governors Island with Leslie Koch, president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation. It was a glorious day, warm and breezy—a perfect introduction to this beautiful, strange, haunted place. The island, located in New York Harbor between Lower Manhattan and Red Hook, Brooklyn, was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1996 and then given to the state (for a buck) shortly after. At one point it was home to more than 3,500 people. Today it still feels like a small New England coastal town or a liberal arts college (albeit an empty one, just eight minutes away by ferry.)

When Governors Island was given to the state, it seemed like one of those too-good-to-be-true, once-in-a-lifetime civic gifts. It had everything: stunning and unique views of New York Harbor, historic architecture (the north end has a whole slew of gorgeous structures, including dozens of gracious officers homes; Castle Williams, built to protect the harbor from British invasion during the War of 1812; a movie theater; a church—all the accoutrements of Small Town America), and enough potential open space on the south end (made from landfill created by construction of the New York City subway) to build a great park.

Very little has happened since. An ideas competition was conducted and all sorts of interesting proposals were floated (including Santiago Calatrava’s decidedly loopy scheme for an “aerial gondola” linking Manhattan and the island). The first president of the corporation, Jim Lima, resigned in frustration. A few more years passed. And I remember thinking: New York is hopeless—we can’t even take advantage of gifts! (By the way, we’re still waiting for Moynihan Station, but that’s another study in frustration.)

After touring the island, however, I gained a new appreciation for the hurdles Koch faces in developing this amazing and confounding place. For the time being, she’s adopted a smart strategy. The Dutch landscape architect Adrien Gauze has created a master plan, still under wraps by the state, for a park on the south end, with an initial price tag of (gulp) $200 million. In the meantime, the corporation is providing free ferries to the island. (They run until October 15th and leave from Manhattan at the Battery Maritime Building on South Street.) Koch’s thinking? Get New Yorkers to experience the island and from that build grassroots support for whatever it might become, if and when additional funding becomes available.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. Unfortunately, the cost of minimal programming for the island is not minimal. It costs about $14 million a year to maintain the island’s crumbling infrastructure and provide transportation to and from it. So anything additional would be on top of that already considerable nut. The corporation also labors under a nasty little deed restriction: the federal turn-over agreement bars most commercial and all residential development. Obviously, if this restriction hadn’t been in place, Governors Island, given its proximity to Lower Manhattan, would already be a kind of gated community for hedge fund managers and investment bankers. So maybe we should be glad it’s there, but it does severely limit development options. Fortunately, Koch—a smart and dynamic woman—appears to be in it for the long haul, which given the nature of things here (the Second Avenue Subway, Ground Zero, Moynihan Station, and so on) seems like an absolute prerequisite.