By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — Before the 9/11 attacks, Muslims who worked in the World Trade Center gathered to pray five times a day in two makeshift prayer spaces located within the Twin Towers.
Those worship spaces — one of which was located in a stairwell near the top of the North Tower, the other on the 17th floor of the South Tower — are the inspiration behind Paul-Felix Montez's proposed installation called "The Prayer Room." The artist hopes to display the work next summer, before the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, in a large exhibit hall downtown.
Montez, 59, a native New Yorker with a set-design company in Las Vegas, plans to recreate the two prayer spaces to scale, with the aim of showing the difficulty of "integration into America and people struggling to find a place — especially in New York," he said in a phone interview Monday.
The exhibit would also include video interviews with Muslims who prayed at the World Trade Center speaking about both the prayer space itself and the experience of being Muslim in America before and after 9/11.
Montez — who once lived near the Twin Towers, studied at the Cooper Union and has shown work in Manhattan galleries — said he has been thinking about "The Prayer Room" for years.
But the recent controversy that arose over the Park51 mosque and community center kicked his plans into high gear.
"It crystallized the idea," Montez said. "I felt like the entire argument was missing the point. Where are the people in all of this? Where is the sense of humanity?"
The artist still needs to secure a sizable space for the installation, and he is currently requesting donations to pay for both the location and materials required to recreate the prayer rooms.
"This belongs in New York," Montez said.
