New York ? One group intends to stage the “World’s Largest Unemployment Line,” with pink slips stretching from Wall Street to Madison Square Garden. Another plans to frame ground zero with bell-ringing activists, intent on shielding the space from what they see as Republican Party exploits.

Advocates for abortion rights are expected to rally. So are labor unions. A group of librarians operating as “Radical Reference” will take crowd questions on all things protest-related. And then there is the more direct path to roiling the Republican National Convention advocated by some self-described anarchists and veteran political protesters:

Sit-ins at delegate hotels. Demonstrations outside major corporate offices. Confrontations with GOP movers-and-shakers on a planned night of Broadway shows the evening before the Republican Party’s presidential nominating convention opens here next week.

Few surprises are expected inside Madison Square Garden, where GOP leaders will nominate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for a second-term presidential ticket in a tightly scripted, four-day event orchestrated to energize the party faithful and win over undecided voters in an election year with razor-thin margins.

Outside the convention hall, it could be another story.

After a muted showing at the Democratic convention in Boston, protesters here are expected to number in the hundreds of thousands and could rival the attention that large-scale and sometimes violent protests drew at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago or the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

The various activist groups hardly speak with one voice. Some are backing Democrat John Kerry. Others aren’t focused on voting — “We’re showing the American people that it’s OK to not be for Bush or for Kerry, because most people aren’t,” Los Angeles native Joe Reinhart said last week in New Haven, Conn., a stopping point along the group DNC2RNC’s 258-mile march from Boston to New York intended to highlight grass-roots activism.

Democratic turf

But taken together, the activists form a highly energized group, motivated by everything from the war in Iraq to the fact the GOP convention is being held in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-1.

“Where do I start? As a New Yorker, it just seems so insulting that the Republicans decided to have the convention here,” said Jenna Freedman, a librarian at Barnard College who lives on the lower East Side and who launched the idea for Radical Reference. “I just can’t come up with any reason except exploiting the pain of Sept. 11. The only Republican here is the mayor.”

The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, tried last week to extend some convention hospitality to the protest crowd. He said buttons bearing a cartoon depiction of the Statue of Liberty and proclaiming the wearer to be a “Peaceful Political Activist” would be good for discounts at city restaurants, shopping and hotels as long as demonstrators agreed to obey city laws.

“It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,” Bloomberg said at a news conference announcing the button discount program. “You can go shopping, maybe replace those sneakers that were worn out on a whole day’s march.”

Tight security

More than 10,000 city police officers will be on patrol in New York, along with Secret Service and FBI agents. Local prosecutors say they are prepared to handle as many as 1,000 arrests a day.

Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said police were most concerned about isolating the small number of protesters who could become violent or disruptive. Otherwise, he said, city police are well-accustomed to accommodating large protest crowds and said one of the only problems was the number of other events scheduled that week.

“We have a lot of things to cover — the U.S. Open (tennis tournament); the Mets and Yankees usually aren’t in town at the same time, but they chose convention week to overlap,” Browne said dryly.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said local police had made strides in accommodating activists in response to complaints after other protests. She raised concerns about efforts by federal agents to track activists and protest plans. “The government is doing a lot to discourage people from coming,” she said.

Those visits were made throughout the Midwest, including to a group of Lawrence, Kan., anarchists in late July.