No longer 'Vatican City' for Watchtower, Brooklyn watches Jehovahs retreat
I thought this was an interesting article, since I lived about 100 feet from the old Margaret Hotel before it burned down. I was in a corner room on the Penthouse (10th floor) of the 107 building just a stone's throw away from the old Margaret. (Harley Miller and his wife Brooke - he was the head of the service dept. way before Jaracz and lived across the hall from my room about 10 feet away and he had to use the hall phone to call and take elder's trouble calls all day, and I could hear him give advice you would never even hear at an elder's class or in the elder's secret books (thus my article on the three faces of the Wartchtower a while back - the WT's Unholy Trinity).
Undated photo of the Hotel Margaret on Columbia Heights, which burned down in 1980. File photo
It was zero degrees outside that night and the wind made it a minus 30 below. About 3AM I heard what I first thought was icycles breaking off the side of the 107 buiilding, but I looked out the window and the Margaret Hotel was on fire! Someone had lit a gas can in the very middle - prob. on the 5th floor, and it went up like a giant torch! The sound was all the windows breaking out. I ran up the steps to the roof and couldn't watch long as Bethel was evacuating the 107 building. This was the night before the renovated Hotel (not shown except right after the fire - my picture in the next post) , someone was seen going into the empty Margaret that was set to open the next morning. The talk was that the safety structure was inadequate for the renovated hotel, and it could be condemned for too much wood and not enough solid structural rebuild.
I don't think they ever built a tunnel under it, but that was about the time I left in 1981 and it had not been bought and rebuilt by the WT yet. Probably another money-making scheme, and they probably bought it cheap!
This Brooklyn Heights Watchtower building at 97 Columbia Heights stands at the site of the Hotel Margaret. File photo
In the next post you will see that the wind blew the ice into a 8 inch thick sheet on my side of the 107 building, the water from the giant firetruck froze practically in midair and ice covered EVERYTHING and we couldn't go back to our rooms for a few days. The firetruck got stuck in the freezing water on the street and they couldn't get it out for about a week, which was also how long the building kept smoldering... at zero degrees no less! Brooklyn Heights is quite an amazing place.
One night the entire Battery end of Manhattan 's power grid went out for two days. Unreal. You saw a COMPLETELY BLACK silhouette of Manhattan, including the Twin Towers, with not even a candle showing... but the lights of Jersey lit up the whole scene like a backlight behind it! I'll bet that was the only time you could ever see ssuch a site or ever will.
By three next days' eve ALL THE STORES were looted and people even took the telephones from the buildings! This was when New York was like Compton (now 8 miles from me) and it was a mean, dirty city and muggings of Bethelites occurred weekly. This story brought it back to me!
Randy
Thursday, October 10, 2013
No longer 'Vatican City' for Watchtower, Brooklyn watches Jehovahs retreat
The Smith children, center, seen at the family's home at 117 Lincoln Place in Park Slope in a photo taken around 1886. The brownstone to the left is the one where modern-day construction of a rear-yard addition is planned. Photo courtesy of Eliza Pepper
Eye On Real Estate: Slope Backyard Wars Fought Over Precious Light and Air
By Lore Croghan
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
All along the Watchtower…real estate investors are keeping their eyes peeled.
Office and residential developers are waiting to see when the Jehovahs Witnesses will bring their next Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO properties to market now that they've finalized the sale of five DUMBO industrial buildings to the Kushner Cos. and RFR.
They have 16 unsold properties – but the clock is ticking. In 2017, they expect to finish building their new headquarters in upstate Warwick, where they are relocating, executives said last week.
The Brooklyn market is “super-hot” and “competition would be huge” for the remaining Watchtower properties, real estate executives told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle .
Richard Devine, chairman of the Witnesses' construction project committee, gave no hints about the religious organization's timetable for selling the Brooklyn holdings but did provide addresses.
Down on the waterfront, there's a five-building office complex – 25, 30, 50 and 58 Columbia Heights and 55 Furman St – and a small vacant lot at 67 Furman St.
Up the hill in Brooklyn Heights, massive Witnesses' properties are clustered at 97, 107, 119 and 124 Columbia Heights. A former hotel with turrets on top is at 21 Clark St.; two smaller buildings are nearby at 80 and 86 Willow St. And there are two vacant lots in DUMBO at 1 York St. and 85 Jay St.
Watchtower building at 124 Columbia Heights. File photo
Also, a hotel at 90 Sands St. will remain occupied by the Witnesses until 2017 but will not be available for sale – Kushner and RFR have agreed to buy it.
The Witnesses completed the sale of 17 Heights and DUMBO properties in the past two years, Devine said – including Montague Street's Bossert Hotel, once called the “Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn.”
Sources with long memories recall the Witnesses' unofficial reason for choosing Brooklyn Heights to build their world headquarters: so their impressive visitors' lobby could look down on Wall Street across the East River. Block-long 124 Columbia Heights filled several brownstone lots. At one now-gone house, 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn Bridge engineer John Roebling, crippled by the bends, had supervised the final stages of the mighty span's construction from a seat by his window via telescope and messenger. The poet Hart Crane, drawn by the Roebling legend, moved to the brownstone several decades later.
Starting in the 1980s, rapidly rising Heights real estate prices – and the high legal costs of taking properties off city tax rolls – gave pause to Watchtower elders, especially those living outside New York. But those objections were invariably over-ruled, a Watchtower honcho of that era told the Brooklyn Height Press – because whether it was a house or a hotel, whenever the group bought a property, the value was higher the very next day.
Undated photo of the Hotel Margaret on Columbia Heights, which burned down in 1980. File photo
At times the Witnesses took pains to keep their expansion on the QT. After the Hotel Margaret, which Bruce Eichner was converting to condos, burned in a spectacular 1980 fire, the developer started construction on that site at the corner of Columbia Heights and Orange Street which was understood to be for co-ops or condos. A neighborhood architect alerted the Height Press that a foundation was being dug for a tunnel to connect the new building to the Witnesses' 107 Columbia Heights on the other side of Orange Street – a signal that the Watchtower was the intended tenant and eventual owner.
Church officials denied the story – but eventually did take control of the building, which is 97 Columbia Heights. And to this day, Watchtower watchers blog about the tunnel connecting the buildings up on the Heights.
This Brooklyn Heights Watchtower building at 97 Columbia Heights stands at the site of the Hotel Margaret. File photo
