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| The Insular World of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ ‘Bethel’ by Sarah Ryley ([email protected]), published online 07-20-2005 | ||||||
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Watchtower Owns 35 Buildings; Group Known For Self-Sufficiency
BROOKLYN — Since the Jehovah’s Witnesses established their headquarters in Brooklyn Heights in 1909, at a time when there were only a few hundred members who called themselves “Bible Students,” their presence in the community has grown to such an extent that outsiders will often say “they own everything” in the neighborhood.
While obviously that perception is not accurate, the Witnesses do own 35 buildings in Brooklyn Heights, some among the tallest, and plan to build four more on a large piece of land in DUMBO that they have been using as a parking lot since the late 1980s.
Recently, they offset this acquisition by selling their 1 million-square-foot building at 360 Furman, which primarily housed their elaborate laundry facility and an extensive array of services, manufacturing centers and trade schools.
The Witnesses’ self-sufficiency is a common objection among area residents and business owners who dislike the idea that such a large proportion of the neighborhood residents do not contribute to the local economy, according to Werner Cohn, who has written for the Brooklyn Heights Press on the Witnesses. This objection has risen from time to time when the Watchtower and Bible Tract Society have sought approval for their latest development, including in the recent battle for their proposed DUMBO project, which was ultimately approved.
Just one building in the DUMBO development, according to a City Planning report, “would contain approximately 1,000 units of sleeping accommodations, an approximately 1,600-seat cafeteria, an approximately 2,500-seat assembly hall, an 1,100-space public parking garage and accessory office and support space.”
The official word from the Watchtower, however, is that “even though the site has been rezoned for residential, there’s still some debate over what’s going to be put there so nothing has been decided.”
From Dry Cleaning to Haircuts
Even though most of the needs of the current 3,600 volunteers living throughout the headquarters, known as Bethel, are provided for, from laundry and dry cleaning to haircuts and food, they do actually purchase goods from ”the outside” with the small stipend they receive from the Society. For example, more than a few Witnesses mentioned Cranberry’s as their favorite place to get coffee, so apparently they don’t grow coffee beans in their massive farming complexes upstate.
Sarah Kate Cintrone, a tour guide for the 117 Adams St. complex, which is connected by a catwalk, said her favorite place to buy clothes is at H&M, a chain retailer that specializes in trendy clothes at cheap prices.
When it comes to caring for their clothes, however, the Witnesses have an elaborate facility that is unlikely matched by even the most expensive private laundry and dry cleaning services. They have 23 different categories for cleaning clothes and linens, and everything gets neatly folded or pressed. In one room off in a corner, a few young women wearing goggles and aprons clean stains off shirts with special solutions depending on the type of stain — alkaline for protein stains, for example — and then spray the solution off with a small, high-powered water hose. In another room, a young women sits at a desk where lost parcels are sent sifting through a box of whites, many of them socks.
The almost obsessively particular care that the 90 Witnesses take of each article of clothing certainly accounts for their pristine appearance, and it can be reasonably assumed that the hairdressers and barbers are equally precise.
Cintrone explains that it is simply cheaper for the Witnesses to provide services and materials for themselves, all done by volunteers, than to go to businesses that have to make a profit. Volunteers also enjoy free healthcare and dental, car washes, freshly prepared meals three times a day, and housing, which gets cleaned by volunteers.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses also keep the exterior of their building impeccably clean — one thing the neighbors can’t complain about. Volunteers are trained within the 117 Adams complex on how to wash windows, with a full wall of different knot samples listing the strength of each type of rope, remove graffiti, paint and roof, among a long list of other things.
Their printing operation, where even their own ink was made, has recently moved to their Wallkill complex upstate because it swelled beyond the capacity of the full city block the Adams complex stands on. They decided to decentralize the operation so that publications such as Awake! and The Watchtower are printed closer to where they are being shipped, all across the world, said Garth Tiglas, the tour guide for 25 Columbia Heights, also known as “The Watchtower.”
Headquarters At 25 Columbia Heights
The 25 Columbia Heights complex — also connected by catwalks — houses the major decision-making bodies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, such as their Governing Body that oversees the interpretation of scripture and their eight committees that decide such things as where the next Kingdom Hall will be built, or what will be published in the next issue of The Watchtower.
Many of their residents are lodged in four of the neighborhood’s eight original hotels. The first to be converted and renovated by the Witnesses was the Towers, a grand building encompassing half a block on Willow Street that has four towers looking out onto the city.
The Standish Arms hotel was also purchased in the 1970s by a private company comprised of wealthy Watchtower elders from different parts of the country, CoHi Towers Incorporated, which then gave the Society the contract to renovate and occupy its rooms.
Also a CoHi project, the Bossert was renovated by the Watchtower, which included refurbishing its elegant rooftop that was famous during the 1950s and 1960s as a dining and dancing spot. On the footprint of the burned-down Margaret Hotel at 97 Columbia Heights, they acquired another residential building.
“It should be noted that the Watchtower had the means to purchase any of the old hotels in the Heights, and indeed looked at all of them,” wrote a long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights. “It is believed that St. George was considered too much of a ‘wreck,’ even though it would have been a perfect fit. And the then-owners of the St. George were tough negotiators, it is rumored.”
Many of the residential units in Brooklyn Heights are actually connected by underground tunnels, “so they don’t disrupt the overall sense of the neighborhood — for example, when we all go to lunch at noon, it would choke up the streets and sidewalks,” said Tiglas.
Tax Exemptions
The fact that none of the Watchtower’s 35 properties are taxed by the city is another objection, and suspicion, routinely brought up by outsiders.
In 1995, “The city estimates the current total market value of the Witness properties that are shown [in Brooklyn Heights] at over $190 million,” Cohn wrote. “One can estimate that the city loses well over ten million dollars a year as a result of Witness real estate holdings in Brooklyn Heights.”
As much as people may object to the Watchtower’s tax exemptions, on a broader scale all religious institutions and non-profit organizations are given tax exemptions. It just so happens that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ world headquarters is located in the small community of Brooklyn Heights, and the quickly growing neighboring DUMBO.
Tiglas also points out that not all Jehovah’s Witnesses live within the Watchtower properties, just the volunteers who have come from all over the world to help with the operations. The rest of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who live all over the country, including in Brooklyn Heights, pay taxes on both their private-sector jobs and their property.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2005
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