This story is a repost from BaltimoreSun.com:
Even in last week’s steamy heat, I got the same chill I always get at Ground Zero. The immensity of the physical and emotional hole left by the 9/11 terrorist attack is hard to imagine from afar — you have to actually be there, looking down into the abyss.
But the other thing that’s hard to imagine from afar is how the sanctity of the site has nothing to do with anything around it. Even two blocks away.
That is where the so-called Ground Zero mosque is supposed to be built. So-called because it can no more be considered the “Ground Zero mosque” than, say, the existing New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club one more block away could be considered the “Ground Zero Gentlemen’s Club.”
From the pitched rhetoric of its opponents, though, you’d think a minaret-topped mosque was going to be built right atop the site of the former World Trade Center.
Instead, Park51, as the proposed building would be called, is envisioned as a community center of about 15 stories which, although it would include a mosque for prayer, would also have a swimming pool, an auditorium and other amenities that make it more akin to a YMCA than a dedicated house of worship. And it wouldn’t be built anywhere on Ground Zero itself but two blocks to the north.
I was in New York last week, my first visit since the whole mosque controversy erupted, and happened to walk past Ground Zero. While this wasn’t a working trip, I had spent a lot of time in the area previously, having covered 9/11 and its aftermath for The Baltimore Sun.
So I can’t walk by the site without my own set of memories playing back: the downtown workers and neighbors who saw it all, the planes crashing, the towers exploding and people jumping from impossibly high stories; the desperation of the rescue workers; and, most of all, the heartbreaking experiences of those who waited in vain that day for loved ones to come home.
It is indeed hallowed ground, and no mosque, or any house of worship, belongs there. It should, and will be, the site of a memorial to the dead — who belonged to no one single faith but any number or none of them at all — and new office towers that will restore the site to its former role as part of the living, breathing, working world of Lower Manhattan.
