Posts by Dogpatch

12

Brooklyn Daily Eagle on WT selling Properties

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

no longer 'vatican city' for watchtower, brooklyn watches jehovahs retreati 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.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle on WT selling Properties

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

no longer 'vatican city' for watchtower, brooklyn watches jehovahs retreati 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.

Dogpatch

Okay, the day after....

three years after leaving Bethel (circa 1984) I went back to have a little fun. :-))

Walking and talking with Albert Schroeder (didn't recognixze me) LOL

Randy

12

Brooklyn Daily Eagle on WT selling Properties

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

no longer 'vatican city' for watchtower, brooklyn watches jehovahs retreati 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.

Dogpatch

Undated photo of the Hotel Margaret on Columbia Heights, which burned down in 1980. File photo

This Brooklyn Heights Watchtower building at 97 Columbia Heights stands at the site of the Hotel Margaret. File photo

Now this next picture I took the day after, still zero degrees.

100 feet from my room!

This was also part of the view from my room:

and let's see if I can find the after fire next day pic...

12

Brooklyn Daily Eagle on WT selling Properties

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

no longer 'vatican city' for watchtower, brooklyn watches jehovahs retreati 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.

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

http://freeminds2.org

http://freeminds.org

Thursday, October 10, 2013

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

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

79

So how exactly did this "new translation" come to be?

by sir82 in

jw
friends

a normal person, upon hearing that a new (or revised) bible translation has been released, would have 2 questions spring to mind almost immediately:.

1) who did the work, and what are their credentials?.

2) what manuscripts is the work based on?.

Dogpatch

Wasblind says,

It is not clear who else worked with Fred. It is a kept secret

No, if you worked in the home at Bethel during the 60s and 70s, you might have discovered that Fred Franz had A jEWISH SCHOLAR FRIEND WHO WAS WITH HIM OFTEN, AND THEY WERE SEEN GOING IN AND OUT OF BETHEL OFTEN. I first had my curiosity piqued by stories of Freddy travelling everywere listening to cassette tapes of some unknown person.

We wondered, "Was it messages from the Illuminati?" Satanic prayers? Why all the secrecy?

It was no little source of gossip. Well that person was the Jewish scholar who was often with Franz, even allowed inside of Bethel at anytime. I can't recall his name. He may have had other such friends, but many at Bethel knew this.

Randy

http://freeminds2.org

http://freeminds.us

45

New Watchtower video on "real friends"

by cedars in

jw
friends

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5schopnecog.

it's difficult to imagine how this video could be more disingenuous and hypocritical.

cedars.

Dogpatch

Most JWs only look outside the Borg for "real" friends. The friendships in a cult are vertical (heirarchical, leading to rat finks) rather than as equals or as a "horizontal" friendship. Very common. Never trust the best of JW friends.

Randy Watters

http://freeminds2.org

26

Marilyn Zweifel of the 800-why-1914 Helpline passed away yesterday

by coffee_black in

jw
friends

marilyn manned the helpline for many years, and touched the lives of so many effected by the wt.

she will be missed.. coffee .

Dogpatch

Marilyn will be truly missed... I have known her personally for about 25 years.

Randy

Dear friends,

It is with sadness that I write this letter. After almost 28 years of serving the BRCI Ministry and talking to thousands of callers, crying with them, praying with them, sharing their problems, and preaching the gospel of Christ as the only way of salvation, I’m not going to be answering the 1-800-WHY-1914 Help-Line number anymore, and the Help-Line is being discontinued.

Due to serious health problems with both my husband and myself, we are unable to serve in this capacity any longer. My husband who has helped me all these years because I’ve been disabled for quite a while now took care of copying our literature and sometimes had to stand in long lines to mail out our packets of information. Much of this information can now be seen on our website at www.brci.org. My husband will be 82 in January and I’ll be 79 in December. I will miss the Help-Line and it saddens me that it must come to its end.

When we started the B.R.C.I Help-Line, we prayed that this was the Lord’s ministry, He would keep it going and when He felt it was time to leave it go, we would do so. As one of our board members said, “We were an oasis in a desert.” Many people that attended the yearly seminars, as well as callers said, “Your ministry is like someone receiving a fresh cool drink.” I’ve met so many wonderful people from this ministry that I feel I was the one that was blessed.

God willing, I’ll still write articles for our website, and you can call me just to keep in touch and let me know how your life is going, as I would be happy to hear from you. You can reach me at my personal phone at (414) 607-0531.

I will greatly miss all the members of the BRCI board. I’ve learned to love them all, and working together was a pleasure. So, this isn’t “Goodbye.” It’s "See you in the wonderful Kingdom of God.

Love in Christ to all,
Marilyn Zweifel
Help-Line Director

Please Note: The information below is retained for historical purposes. As noted by Marilyn above, however, the HelpLine is no longer operational.--BRCI Webmaster

The BRCI HelpLine was implemented in response to the universal need that nearly all of us have when going through difficult times, to talk to someone who can relate to us and who understands our situation. If you call the BRCI HelpLine, Marilyn Zweifel, shown above, will usually get your message. Like all persons associated with BRCI, she receives no salary for her tireless assistance. Marilyn is experienced and sypathetic in giving reassurance and guidance to those who are distressed by their own circumstances or the actions of others.
Anyone calling our toll-free HelpLine may request a packet of information of interest to persons with questions about Watchtower teachings and practices, including subjects such as “Declared Righteous Or Not?”, “The Faithful and Discreet Slave and Jehovah's Witnesses”, “The Prophecy of ‘Peace and Security’”, “Do You Have a Mediator?”, “Baptized into the Organization?” and “Does God Work Through An Organization?” This information will be sent to you postpaid for a suggested contribution of $3.00 to help cover postage and copying costs.
Marilyn, like all those who are called upon and authorized to respond to the BRCI HelpLine, is a former Jehovah's Witness. She is also a professional counselor licensed in Wisconsin. You may reach her by phone at 1-800-WHY-1914 or 414-607-0531 (not toll-free) between 9AM and 5PM Central Time. Calls are, of course, kept confidential.

BRCI Help-Line
P. O. Box 80203
Seattle WA 98108-0203 USA

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