45-47 Park Place. Image: Google Street View.

Tuesday morning, I attended the final vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on whether or not to confer historic protection to 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The commission voted unanimously (9-0) against protecting the site. For this site, unlike many of the other buildings brought to a vote, the stakes far exceeded any simple determination of historical significance in architectural or cultural terms. The site in question is proposed for an Islamic cultural center and mosque whose proximity to Ground Zero has sparked a controversy that has motivated passionate, and often inflammatory, commentary from national and local politicians (Palin, Gingrich, Lazio), civil rights groups both for (ACLU) and against (Anti-Defamation League) the project, neighbors and community leaders. For a brief overview of the controversy and yesterday’s public hearing, read Javier Hernandez’s report for the New York Times City Room here. More coverage can be found on Gotham Gazette.

The Press assembled at Pace University's Schimmel Auditorium after the Landmark Preservation Commission's vote was announced

Speaking to CNN on Monday, Landmarks Preservation Commission spokeswoman Elisabeth de Bourbon reminded the public that the “purpose of [the] vote is to decide whether the building has a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation.” And, indeed, Commissioners cited such architectural ornaments as cornice moldings and the fact that the building’s architect is unknown in their testimonies. But this clarity of focus did little to diminish the perception (at least among hearing attendees) that the vote was a direct ruling on whether or not the mosque should be built at the site in question. Public comments were not allowed. Nonetheless, attendees made their opinions known. Those in support of the mosque project (myself included) applauded when the vote was announced. A few opponents shouted “disgrace” and “shame on you.” The first of these outbursts challenged the commissioners with the question “Did any of you lose anyone on 9/11?” Another opponent, who burst into tears when the vote was announced, held a hand-painted placard that read: “Islam builds Mosques at Sites of their Conquests and Victories.” Another sign read “Don’t Glorify Murders of 3,000; No 9/11 Victory Mosque.”

Developer Sharif El-Gamal, whose company Soho Properties owns the adjacent site, responding to reporters questions after the Landmarks Preservation Committee public hearing

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was raised in a secular Muslim household with strong interfaith tendencies. We attended mosque (20 miles and four suburbs away), a couple times a year, on holidays. And we attended church (across the street from our house) on Christmas. From a young age, I have identified as Muslim. I have not regularly attended any particular organized prayers since moving to New York, in part because I am not especially observant and in part because the congregants at the mosque a few blocks from where I live in Brooklyn tend to espouse a more conservative and restrictive interpretation of Islamic theology than my own. For this reason, I was heartened to learn the Cordoba Initiative, a progressive organization dedicated to improving relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, was one of the groups behind the project to bring a Islamic cultural center to Lower Manhattan. And I followed the project closely as it won community board approval and Mayoral support before becoming engulfed in controversy that seemed, at times, to characterize religious freedom and honoring the dead as mutually exclusive goals. Very little of the media coverage looked beyond this false binary to highlight the fact that Lower Manhattan has, since September 11th, seen its residential population increase almost 140% (from 22,961 in 13,046 units in 2001 to 55,000 in 27,881 units today, according to the Downtown Alliance) without a commensurate increase in publicly accessible community facilities, faith-based or otherwise. Very few of the voices speaking out for or against the project — with the significant exception of Mayor Bloomberg — noted the appropriate limits on the role of government in determining how a private landowner can use her property.

If I were not so emotionally invested in the outcome of the public hearing, I might say that the scene made for riveting political theater: the commissioners, the press, the protesters. Simply hearing how commissioners frame their arguments for or against the granting of landmark status helped me to understand the priorities of a city agency with considerable influence over development in New York City. Tuesday, however, my curiosity about city process was secondary to a deep sense of bafflement that, once again, a battle about the politics of memory, tragedy and religious tolerance found itself waged in terms of architecture.

The aftermath of September 11th put architecture on the front page of newspapers worldwide. But, to my mind, what people were debating was not architecture in and of itself, but rather architecture’s capacity to act as a container for public memory, to provide meaning. This capacity is precisely what the Landmarks law of 1965 was intended to enshrine. The mission of the city agency that resulted from the law is to “Safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage; help stabilize and improve property values in historic districts; encourage civic pride in the beauty and accomplishments of the past; protect and enhance the city’s attractions for tourists; strengthen the city’s economy; and promote the use of landmarks for the education, pleasure, and welfare of the people of New York City.”

In that light, I find the way some of the project’s opponents proposed to use landmark designation in order to prevent a feared future rather than preserve a shared past to be, at best, ironic. Obviously, historic preservation is as often used as a tool to inhibit change as it is to celebrate history. And in this case, opponents of the project found no means to stop the project on legal grounds, so a law that can be interpreted on subjective grounds became a means of last resort. The attempt to commandeer the notion of architectural significance as a legal mechanism to obstruct a building project on privately owned land may not be new, but it still strikes me as inconsistent with the spirit of preserving cultural heritage and encouraging civic pride.

For some people, the debates about Ground Zero were about the prospective power of an imagined architectural future that might honorably replace and memorialize what has been lost. For some people, debates about 45-47 Park Place were about the proscriptive power of subjective (yet legally binding) readings of architectural history to stop a building project some people don’t like. In both cases, architecture seems to be incidental to larger questions about civic memory and how to make one particular version of that civic memory invulnerable to change.

Throughout, Mayor Bloomberg’s support for the project has been forceful. After the vote, he held a press conference on Governors Island and spoke of the development at 45-47 Park Place in the context of upholding what he called “the most important” of our civil liberties, the right to worship as we wish.

[Landmarks'] decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

His speech — delivered on Governors Island “where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted,” in view of the Statue of Liberty, flanked by an ecumenical group of political and religious leaders — was, like the debate, loaded with symbolism. Unlike the debate, Mayor Bloomberg’s symbolism invoked American culture as political philosophy and constitutional legacy. Arguably, this legacy has informed, and will continue to inform “the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation,” which are precisely what Landmarks is empowered to safeguard. In other words, the symbols Mayor Bloomberg invoked were about rights and freedoms, not bricks and mortar. And certainly not cornices.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.