A hotly debated Islamic center just steps from the Ground Zero site in lower Manhattan is officially no more.
Developer Sharif El-Gamal had proposed to build a 15-story center just two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. Now, he’s decided to build a 667-foot condominium tower at 45 Park Place.
El-Gamal’s plan calls for a glass skyscraper, which will include 15 full-floor units. Condos will range from 3,000 to 3,700 square foot, at a cost of $3,000 per square foot. In other words, units will range from $9 million to $11.1 million a piece.
“The tower is going to be a market-maker,” El-Gamal tells Crain’s. “We’ve perfected a building that’s really going to share in a unique moment.”
El-Gamal first announced the mosque project in 2010 and shelved it one year later after fierce opposition.
“Every day that we’ve been waiting, the market has been getting stronger and showing incredible signs of resilience,” El-Gamal says. “The appreciation and absorption this market is showing is unprecedented.”
Opponents of the Ground Zero mosque celebrated the news.
“We did it! We the people,” Islam critic Pamela Geller writes on her site. “President Obama pushed for it, then-Mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg supported it, the media actively campaigned for it — the elites in their increasingly fragile ivory towers stumped for the mosque.
“But the people stood up and fought it and won.”
Geller, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, radio hosts Steve Malzberg and Mike Gallagher, as well as the late Andrew Breitbart led a 40,000-person rally against the mosque project in September 11, 2010 — nine years after radical Islamists toppled the Twin Towers with hijacked passenger jets.
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