by The Awl

Do we need a Scandinavian Sade? I will admit that there is no place for one on my list of requirements and that, prior to being informed about this track, it would have never occurred to me that such a thing even existed. And yet here were are. As they tell you in grade school, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. And, actually, in the scheme of things, a Scandinavian Sade might not be an absolute requirement for a fulfilling existence, but on a cold and rainy Friday heading into a wet weekend there are plenty of less enjoyable experiences one could encounter (and no doubt eventually will) so it’s probably best to allow this one in and enjoy.

★★ Drops were on the windows, but the showers had stopped in time for the trip to school. Only out in the sweltering hallway did it become clear how much the air conditioners had been doing. More rain fell and stopped. Over the brick forecourt it was dripping, or still raining, or beginning to rain once more. On the benches were new wet spots, or old wet spots slow to dry. A bright circle in the clouds, not the sun but an indication of the sun, was reflected in a gutter puddle. In between the noises of the Times Square BMT platform came the patter of falling water. Downtown the crosshatching of the metal stair treads had been impressed into trampled soggy newspaper. Back uptown, in the time it took to finish early pre-K checkout, the wind kicked up from the river and carried a chill. In the mirror, the end of each strand of hair was hooking upward like the handle of a cane. It had gotten cool enough for the rain jacket, but there was no new rain. The ice cream truck was still out on the corner.

This week’s episode is about the sci-fi future of food. And the science-fictional now of food. Why are we eating these things? Is the decade-plus rise of foodie and celebrity chef culture culminating in something… much weirder than anyone expected?

Helen Rosner of Eater and Felix Salmon of Fusion join us to talk about the rise of the neo-chain, the arrival of the hipster food venture capitalist, and the frothy intersection of capital, consumption and status in 2015.

Also: An interview with the chef of the hottest new restaurant… of 2081. (Based on this piece; thanks to Emily Fleischaker and Haley Mlotek for reading.)

How to listen:

Subscribe in iTunes
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Or just search for The Awl in any popular podcast app.

Thanks, as always, to the delicious Williamsburg Pizza.

by Brendan O’Connor

Five years ago, a local land-use issue here in New York City became the subject of national debate. Two Muslim men — a real-estate developer and an imam — proposed to build a Ground Zero Victory Terror Mosque two blocks away from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. Haha, no: They proposed to build a fifteen-story Islamic cultural center. Still, while many New Yorkers were ambivalent about this (although it seems worth noting that the local community board voted overwhelmingly in favor of the project), people outside of New York were stridently against it (because dog whistles work). Anyway, demolition at the site began earlier this year, and, if all goes according to plan, a seventy-story ultra-luxury condominium tower will have risen there by 2017. Wait a minute, what happened to the cultural center, you ask?

The five-story building at 45 Park Place, in Lower Manhattan, was built in the late eighteen fifties. In 1968, it was bought by pioneering discount retailer Sy Syms and his partner Isidore (“Irving”) Pomerantz. In 1990, the Pomerantz family leased the building to the Burlington Coat Factory, and eleven years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, a piece of landing-gear assembly from either American Airlines Flight 11 or United Airlines Flight 175 plummeted through the roof, crashing through two floors but injuring no one. (According to the New York Times, the store wasn’t yet open for the day, so the staff of about eighty employees were having breakfast in the basement.) For the next eight years, the Burlington Coat Factory was abandoned. Kukiko Mitani — whose deceased husband, Stephen Pomerantz, had at one point reportedly listed the building for eighteen million dollars — sold it to a developer, Soho Properties, for nearly five million dollars in July 2009, because it was in the middle of the recession and she needed the money.

After Soho Properties purchased the building, the space was used on Fridays, under temporary permits of assembly, as an overflow prayer space for TriBeCa’s Al Farah mosque, a ten minute walk north at 245 West Broadway, where Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Sufi Muslim, who was born in Kuwait to Egyptian parents and studied physics at Columbia University, was the spiritual leader. Abdul Rauf, who had led services in the neighborhood since 1983, is also the founder of the Cordoba Initiative, an interfaith group which invested in the building’s purchase with Soho Properties. In December 2009, Abdul Rauf and Sharif El-Gamal, the chairman and CEO of Soho Properties (and college dropout born in Park Slope to an Egyptian father and Polish mother), floated the idea of repurposing the building as a cultural center for the neighborhood, of which a mosque would be one part. Its proximity to the World Trade Center “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11… We want to push back against the extremists,” Abdul Rauf told the Times. “What happened that day,” the imam said, “was not Islam.”

The following summer, in 2010, the local community board voted twenty-nine-to-one, with ten abstentions, to approve plans for a fifteen-story, hundred-million-dollar community center modeled on the 92nd Street Y. Abdul Rauf referred to it as the Cordoba House; El-Gamal referred to it as Park51; and around the country, people referred to it, variously, as the “Ground Zero mosque,” the “Ground Zero terror mosque,” and the “Victory Mosque.” “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington,” former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich said. “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.” (Technically, Curbed pointed out at the time, it would be a musalla, not a mosque, “but ‘Ground Zero Musalla’ is way less catchy!”) Republican candidates for governor called for an investigation into the project’s financing: “This is about transparency. This about the safety of the people of New York,” former-congressman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio said. “Religion has nothing to do with this.” (Those requests were denied by then-attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo.) The families of victims were trotted out. “People are being accused of being anti-Muslim and racist, but this is simply a matter of sensitivity,” a dead firefighter’s mother told the Times. “It’s hard enough to go down to that pit of hell and death.” Now, of course, that pit of hell and death has been beautifully landscaped into the place where Vogue is produced and from which Fox News will soon be broadcast.

As it turned out, the money behind the site was worth investigating, though perhaps not for the reasons Republican politicians and right-wing activists might have hoped or expected: In its early years, Abdul Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative was reportedly funded in large part by R. Leslie Deak, a Muslim convert with CIA ties. (“The Ground Zero Mosque Was an Inside Job,” Gawker quipped.) On the other side of the argument, the Islamophobes were heavily bankrolled by hedge-funder Robert Mercer, who personally paid for a million-dollar advertising campaign stirring up anti-mosque sentiment. According to the New York Times, Mercer, who was a researcher at IBM before he joined the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, has donated more than fifteen million dollars to conservative political causes since 2012. In 2013, a group of former employees at his house sued him for failing to pay overtime; he is currently financing Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19bLFjwYYA0

In any event, Abdul Rauf and El-Gamal did not back down. “We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners,” the imam wrote in an op-ed for the Times that September. “Our name, Cordoba, was inspired by the city in Spain where Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages during a period of great cultural enrichment created by Muslims. Our initiative is intended to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures.” The next day, El-Gamal, the developer, sent an press release reminding people that the building’s official name was Park51. (An interview with El-Gamal on beliefnet.com offers some clarification as to the internal structure of the proposed project: Park51 was the name for the building and, apparently, the organization that would manage the building, which would hypothetically incorporate as a tax-exempt non-profit; the Cordoba House was to direct the interfaith programming at Park51; and the mosque, which was never named, would also incorporate as a separate non-profit.)

Late that summer, though, it had came to light that Soho Properties did not actually own the entire property on which El-Gamal and Abdul Rauf had proposed to renovate and build the community center, which was to stretch from 45 to 51 Park Place. (Hence the name.) While Soho Properties controlled the entire site, technically what it had purchased from the Pomerantz family in 2009 was only 45–47 Park Place; 49–51 Park Place, which at one point had been used as a Consolidated Edison substation, was still owned by the energy company. When Soho Properties bought 45–47 Park Place from the Pomerantz family in 2009, it also paid seven hundred thousand dollars to take over the ninety-nine year, thirty-three-thousand-dollar-per-year lease at the adjacent building. (Common walls between the two buildings had been demolished years before, rendering them, functionally, one big building.) In February of 2010, the New York Post reported, Soho Properties had told Con Ed that it wanted to exercise the purchase option on the lease, which would not expire until 2071, at which point the utility initiated an appraisal to determine the property’s value. “We are following our legal obligations under the lease. We will not allow other considerations to enter into this transaction,” Con Ed told the Post in August. Until Soho Properties owned the full lot outright, it could not move to raze the old buildings and construct the envisioned fifteen-story Park51.

However, the Con Ed sale did not go through until August 2014, when Soho Properties purchased 49–51 Park Place for just over ten million dollars. The delay was caused, in part, because El-Gamal challenged Con Ed’s appraisal in court, and even appealed when a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan approved the valuation. Meanwhile, Con Ed was threatening to evict Soho Properties, claiming that the developer owed nearly two million dollars in back rent, all of which was settled with the 2014 sale of the building. “We are pleased to have concluded a complex acquisition from Con Edison allowing us to complete the assemblage for our upcoming developments at Park Place. This further exemplifies our strength as a buyer of real estate from institutional sellers,” El-Gamal said in a statement to the Times.

In that time, El-Gamal’s relationship with Abdul Rauf deteriorated. They split in January 2011, just months after having seemingly weathered the summer’s storm. “Imam Feisal has no authority or control over this project, over its board of directors or over Soho Properties, which controls the real estate,” El-Gamal said in a statement, after Abdul Rauf told the Buffalo News that he would be willing to find a new location for the cultural center. (“I would move because my whole life is about improving relationships with people,” the imam said.) As of January 11th, the Times reported, Abdul Rauf would remain on Park51’s board of directors, but he was not permitted to raise money or speak on behalf of the development. Three weeks later, Sheik Abdallah Adhami, who El-Gamal had appointed to replace Abdul Rauf, also stepped down, after comments that he had made in one of his lectures — an “enormously overwhelming percentage of people struggle with homosexual feeling because of some form of violent emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their life” — came to light.

An older rendering of 45 Park Place

In January 2013, Soho Properties acquired the adjacent 43 Park Place for eight million dollars. That April, The Real Deal reported that El-Gamal was talking to brokers about how best to build and market condos in the neighborhood. “Plans for the site will be announced at a later date,” El-Gamal’s spokesman Hank Sheinkopf, a consultant and Democratic political operative who once gave a very interesting interview to kabbalah.info on the financial crisis and the future of humanity, told The Commercial Observer after Soho Properties applied for demolition permits the next year. In May 2014, after announcing earlier that they would not be building a fifteen-story cultural center, but rather a three-story museum (including a sanctuary for prayer services) Soho Properties filed permits to build condos. “The original plan did not work,” El-Gamal told the Real Deal later that summer. “However, I never backpedaled or shifted from what the dream has always been. I did not want to subject my children to [other]… kids saying ‘that’s the child of the man who backed down.’ This [plan] is going to show the excellence of Muslims and the Islamic culture.”

Last week, Soho Properties released details of the project to Bloomberg Businessweek: a seventy-story, ultra-luxury condominium tower, including at least fifteen full-floor units to be marketed at prices higher than three thousand dollars per square foot. There will be a fifty-foot swimming pool in the basement and concierge service. A public plaza will connect the condos to the (much reduced) Islamic museum and prayer space at the site. Above three hundred feet, all of the apartments will be full-floor units with private elevators and twelve-foot floor-to-ceiling windows offering unobstructed views of Midtown, the Hudson River, and the Statue of Liberty. “You can’t see Ground Zero from our current building and on completion of our planned building some years from now, there won’t be any views of the Ground Zero memorial from the building,” El-Gamal said in his July 2010 interview with beliefnet.com. Now, however, the 9/11 Memorial would appear to be visible from the planned condos above three hundred feet. Plans change.

We are looking for a marketing intern with strong knowledge of the digital media landscape. All inquiries please email hr@park51.org

— Park51 (@Park51) September 29, 2015

Renderings courtesy their respective architects/developers

by The Awl

In this week’s Ask a Bro, host Lauren Oyler suffers the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where she learns that talent is dead and everything is fake.

Lauren is in LA on the lookout for fame bros; luckily, they’re the opposite of elusive. The men she meets are happy to regale her with tales of celebrity, of plastic surgery and reality TV, of Instagram fans and being destined for stardom. Indeed, it seems there’s nothing these bros love more than themselves — besides, maybe, their hoverboards.

You Suck, Your Pictures Are Stupid And Everything You Enjoy Is Trash, Don’t You Know How Gross You Are?

“Superb widely available cameras, often on our phones, have turned us all into ‘artists’. But the art we make, coo over and share on Instagram is often unbelievably corny, sentimental, vacuous nonsense. The more easily created and universally visible photography becomes, it seems the more flesh-crawlingly stupid its aesthetic values. We are turning into a world of bad artists, cosily congratulating one another on every new slice of sheer kitsch.”

by The Awl

Sheila McClear on the emotional labor she performed once for a terrible man:

He didn’t say $400 straight out. He didn’t name any sort of price and I knew it’d be gauche to ask; it would ruin the deal. I had just started a two-year career in the business of fleecing men for money, in strip clubs and peep shows, and sometimes guys would offer me more money to hang out with them in various ways, many of them quite innocent. I’d never taken anyone up on it, except Greg, because I had the feeling he was harmless. I met him hanging around the front of the club, drinking a Heineken. He was 20 years older than me, handsome enough, with salt-and-pepper hair, and was wearing a crisp white button-down shirt, the kind the guys I dated never owned.

Read the rest at the Billfold.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Little Fugue

The world has become a mewling baby
 — Lisa Robertson

Bloody world, greedy little marketplace,
How you have flooded
Our minds with the bodies of women,

So many they are clogging the feeds.
The sea churns up its warrior dead too,
Says, enough, enough,

Spits out your plastics, your
Your replicas, your portion
Control. Where will your Beethovens

Thrive in this new Century? How
Will you hear them with your ear
Buds in?

While we were busy
Following someone’s dead
Link, the world has transformed.

I used to fear the empty
Shopping mall,
Its dead arteries

And veins that close
In upon themselves,
Without grief.

Now I log on
Every morning
And see strangers

Planting their aspirations,
Sweet and leafy
For me to read.

Sina Queyras lives in Montreal.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Awl Sponsors

Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a new top boss at The Daily Show, and his name is Trevor Noah. The South African-born comic has already made waves with his “War on Bullsh*t” and a new round of diverse writers and correspondents. If you are worried about the iconic Jon Stewart’s departure, don’t be. You can still expect hard hitting feature stories like the one in the video above. Read on for the scoop.

Trevor Noah said it best: “America really loves prison.” In this clip, Noah responds to news that the Senate introduced a criminal justice reform bill that would eliminate some of the obstacles that prisoners and former offenders face. But the question remains: is it nearly enough?

Catch the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Weeknights on Comedy Central and the Comedy Central APP.