After yet another fractious public hearing, an Islamic group’s controversial plan to tear down a 152-year-old building two blocks from the World Trade Center and replace it with a community center and mosque is a step closer to reality.

The board voted 24-11 (with two abstentions) to recommend to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission that 45-47 Park Place be declared unworthy of landmark status. Should the Commission agree when it revisits the matter in August, it would pave the way for the Cordoba Initiative—an Islamic group that purchased the building last year—to demolish the existing structure and erect its planned 13-story, $100 million community center and mosque on the site.

Prior to the vote, CB1’s Landmarks Committee Chairman Roger Byrom said that the building—a five-story, Italian Renaissance palazzo-style warehouse—would have contributed to the Tribeca South historic district, had the district been extended south to include Park Place. But by itself, Byrom said, the building didn’t warrant protection as a landmark.

“For an individual landmark, one has to be able to say that [the building] is exceptional in New York City, and we just didn’t feel like it was,” Byrom said. “It’s a shame that this wasn’t included in the extension that we worked so hard to get [in the 1990s].”

Formerly the home of a Burlington Coat Factory outlet and surrounded mainly by modern, bulky office buildings, 45-47 Park Place is today used as a prayer space for hundreds of Muslims every Friday afternoon. Otherwise, it has remained largely vacant since it was damaged during the Sept. 11 attacks. Constructed in 1858 for a shipping firm, it is among a handful of buildings in southern Tribeca that were left out of the historic district the Commission approved in the 1980s and a district extension a decade later. The commission held a hearing on the building in 1989, but never acted. It has remained in limbo ever since.

In its resolution, the board asked the Landmarks Commission to require the Cordoba group to save the building’s cast-iron and stone façade and include it in the community center and mosque’s design. Several CB1 members wondered why only part of the building was worthy of preservation. Byrom said that Cordoba’s purported budget for their project offered a unique opportunity to save a piece of the building’s history, a costly request that private developers are ordinarily spared in similar situations.

“If this was an individual land-owner, of course we couldn’t suggest that,” Byrom said.

Another meeting, another raucous debate

While the board’s contemplation of the building’s future Tuesday night was confined to its perceived worth as a historic landmark, the 90 minutes of public comment that preceded the vote were another story. As they had at the board’s May 25 meeting and at a preliminary Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on July 13, dozens of opponents to the Cordoba group’s plans for the site used the comment session to rail against the idea of a mosque in close proximity to the former World Trade Center and, in many cases, against the Islamic religion on the whole.

“Is it really tolerant to bring a radically intolerant creed into Lower Manhattan and allow it to propagate in a massive, $100-million structure,” Robert Spencer said.

The Cordoba Initiative, led by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, first announced its plans to build an educational and cultural center on the site in May. The new building, according to Rauf, would be outfitted with public facilities like a 500-seat performing arts theater, fitness center, swimming pool, and library, conference rooms, basketball courts and restaurants, as well as a ground-floor mosque.

At 13 stories tall, the proposed building would not be visible from the Memorial Park, under construction at the World Trade Center site (a 19-story office tower stands opposite the Cordoba site). Still, many family members and friends of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have spoken out against the project’s construction, calling the plans insensitive to the memories of their loved ones.

“Ground Zero is the burial site of my son,” said Joyce Boland, whose son Vincent Jr., was killed on the 97th floor of Tower 1. “I don’t want to go down there to see and pray and talk to him, to look up and see a mosque overwhelming and looking down on me.”

While the building may not be worth saving for its architectural features, several speakers on Tuesday said that it should be preserved for its link to the Sept. 11 attacks.

“That building should be dedicated as a war memorial,” said Pamela Gellar, an organizer of the Stop Islamisation of America political group. “It’s as much a part of American history, just as much as Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor.”

As with previous hearings, those who spoke in favor of the project’s construction were heckled by people in the audience who opposed it. One man, Harlem resident Jeffery LaFrancois, was called a ‘homosexual’ as he made his case for supporting the project. Even State Sen. Daniel Squadron, pressed by the crowd for his opinion of the Cordoba group’s proposal, was not spared the opponents’ scorn.

“Especially in Lower Manhattan, we’re welcoming, we are diverse,” Squadron said as he was roundly booed. “There should be no areas that don’t accept religions or cultures anywhere in this country, and certainly not here.”

Imam Rauf, who has led the Farah Mosque at 245 West Broadway in Tribeca since 1983, has said that his group plans to include its own 9/11 memorial inside the new center, and that he hopes to meet with family members of victims who oppose the project.

“We understand their fear,” Rauf, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, said in May. “But fear is addressed not by walking away or condemning it, but by ministering to the pain, and that is what we intend to do.”

UPDATE: The Landmarks Preservation Commission will render its decision on the status of 45-47 Park Place on Aug. 3 at 9:30 a.m. The hearing will be held at Pace University's The Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, 3 Spruce Street.