CHRONIQUE DE L'ISLAMISATION DES USA
Cheryl K. Chumley: Can the Ground Zero Mosque be stopped with historic preservation laws?
By: Cheryl K. Chumley
OpEd Contributor
August 11, 2010
Ludicrous. Laughable. Those are just two words that come to mind after the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9-0 to deny historic preservation status to the building at 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The vote clears the way for developer Sharif El-Gamal to proceed with his Muslim center and mosque construction plans on a parcel just two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood.
On July 27, the LPC designated two buildings in Midtown and Manhattan as landmarks based, in part, on their architectural designs. The LPC's Web site calls one a "Beaux Arts-style mansion in the Murray hill neighborhood of Manhattan"; the other, the Modernist Look Building.
In June, the LPC granted landmark status to two more, the "Beaux-Arts office building and [the] Art Deco apartment complex in the Bronx." Several others made the LPC cut this past year: a 21-story Modernist tower built in the early 1960s for use by a textile manufacturer. A handful of Queen Anne-style houses built in 1912 in the Bronx. And four 19th-century row houses on Staten Island.
The point is this: The LPC actively seeks properties to tag using standards for selection that are poorly defined.
Not convinced? In May, the LPC "for the first time approved the designation of a brewery as a New York City landmark," its Web site touted.
But not the building at the site of the planned mosque development -- the one that took a hit on Sept. 11 when landing gear from one of the hijacked planes crashed through the roof of what was then a Burlington Coat Factory. This is the same building that was once reportedly part of the textile district -- and as noted above, the LPC likes to save textile properties -- that encircled City Hall.
Instead of decrying, condemning and reproving, politicians like Rep. Peter King, D-N.Y., who called the mosque project "particularly offensive," have opportunity to take action.
The federal government has at its disposal dozens of land preservation methods that could delay or even halt development of the Islamic center.
King, for instance, could introduce legislation extending the National Memorial designation currently affixed to the World Trade Center Site and in so doing, have a say in future development. Congress and the interior secretary could set the wheels in motion to preserve the property under the Historic Sites Act of 1935, a federal code that allows the National Park Service to "restore, reconstruct, rehabilitate, preserve and maintain" properties of historical significance.
Or, Congress could introduce legislation to expand the boundaries of the coincidentally close-by Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, or NHA, a preservation tag that runs from New York City to Albany.
An NHA designation does not take away control of the land from the owner. But it does put the property under a protective listing that could -- and at the 49 sites in the nation that have the NHA tag, very often does -- lead to exchanges of federal dollars for tightened local zoning and land use laws.
To set the wheels of NHA designation in motion takes a piece of legislation, and to obtain the actual declaration requires that property owners be informed their lands may be included in the heritage site. But that requirement is loosely enforced.
Some property owners don't even know an NHA has been declared on their property until well after the fact. Notification can take the form of a government official posting an announcement for a public hearing about the NHA on a local library's bulletin board.
These land designations require some level of support from the property owners, at least in theory. They're not akin to outright eminent domain takings. They wouldn't halt development overnight. They take congressional approval and in most cases, the president's blessing.
Mere introduction of such legislation in Congress pointing to the historical aspects of the property could work to delay its development and buy time for public pressure to mount.
Cheryl Chumley, cherylchumley.com, spent a year researching National Heritage Areas and land rights as a journalism fellow with the Phillips Foundation.
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