Curbed reports<\/a> that 25-30 Columbia Heights, which for decades sported a beaming red Watchtower sign with a large digital clock on top, is being proposed as a housing conversion with space for 661 units. <\/p>\nThe Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses formerly owned this five-building assemblage, part of the massive, and well-maintained, property portfolio the religious group sold to fund a new headquarters in upstate Warwick. Between 2004 and 2018, the organization offloaded more than three dozen properties in Brooklyn, its home base for more than a century. <\/p>\n
A rendering of what might be to come. Courtesy of CIM Group<\/p>\n
An aerial rendering of the development site. Courtesy of CIM Group<\/p>\n
Nothing yet is set in stone \u2014 though local residents told Curbed they\u2019re in favor of a residential conversion at a time of a city housing crisis. Documents submitted to the Department of City Planning, as cited by the outlet, propose a change in zoning from commercial\/manufacturing to mixed-use to make it possible.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the CIM Group \u2014 along with LIVWRK and the Kushner Companies \u2014 paid a cool $340 million for 25-30 Columbia Heights, which now stand largely vacant. They planned to convert the properties into an office complex and a film studio to be called Panorama.<\/p>\n
The subsequent years, however, had different plans. Despite renovating the structures and removing the Watchtower sign from the crown, the film studio never came to fruition. COVID-19 also threw quite the wrench in developers\u2019 plans to create a thriving Brooklyn office market, which included the \u201cF train tech corridor.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses\u2019 headquarters were best known for the Watchtower sign \u2014 and now, this assemblage is being proposed for housing. LightRocket via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The headquarters occupied the most prime stretch of Brooklyn. Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses sold off its empire over the course of 14 years to fund construction of a new headquarters in Warwick, New York. Getty Images<\/p>\n
Now CIM, which bought out the two other partners in 2018, sees current demand for something else: housing along Brooklyn\u2019s most prime stretch of waterfront.<\/p>\n
Of the 661 proposed dwellings, 165 would be designated for affordable housing. And in order to create space for such a sum of units, some structural work would be needed, according to Curbed. <\/p>\n
One extra floor would be added to the 13-story 30 Columbia Heights \u2014 bringing its height to 14 levels \u2014 and five would be tacked atop the 12-story 25 Columbia Heights, raising it to 17 floors. <\/p>\n
These proposed additions would boost the existing 700,000-square-foot sprawl to an 831,000-square-foot total.<\/p>\n
CIM has only just begun the process known as ULURP \u2014 the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure \u2014 which takes about seven months after submission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A famed complex of buildings located next to the Brooklyn Bridge may become home to a batch of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,6748,99,2907,66182,9,24,63,1491,3006],"class_list":["post-175364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-heights","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-housing","tag-jehovahs-witnesses","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-real-estate","tag-residential-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}