http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/no-longer-vatican-city-watchtower-brooklyn-watches-jehovahs-retreat-2013-10-09-180000
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
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