City residents that are concerned about plans for a mosque to be built near the World Trade Center site will have to wait to see if it will actually be constructed.

Emotions ran high Tuesday at a meeting of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The vote, however, won’t be held until later this summer.

At issue: whether to grant landmark status to a building near ground zero, where a Muslim group wants to build a mosque.

“It’s called Islama-phobia pure and simple and do not allow … Now, you see, if this is the voice, if this is the voice of reason then we’ve got a lot to contend with,” said Zead Ramadan of the Council on Islamic-American Relations New York.

“It would be a travesty to permit this building to be removed. It would be like removing the sunken ships from Pearl Harbor to erect a memorial for the Japanese kamikazes killed in the attack,” said Sam Nunberg of the Center for Law and Justice.

Passions ran high at the meeting as the commission considered whether to grant landmark status to the building at 45 and 47 Park Place, where a Muslim group wants to build a $100 million mosque and community center.

Site owner Sharif El-Gamal asked the commission to “understand the importance of this project to revitalizing New York.” And he begged the group not to grant landmark status to the 1857 Italian Renaissance-inspired building. That would make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the mosque because changes to historic buildings are hard to get approved.

“The landing gear from one of the planes from the 9/11 attack crashed into that building, went through the roof and down into the basement and that should be a museum,” Murray Hill resident Barbara Paolucci said.

Which is exactly why 9/11 families and other groups want the landmark status to be approved. They see it as a backdoor way to stop the mosque from being built near ground zero.

The Landmark Preservation Commission won’t vote until later in the summer. Members of the commission are appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He supports the mosque.

(Source: WCBSTV)