The biggest expansion in the way of structures has taken place in Brooklyn, New York, at the headquarters of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.

In the fall of 1969 strong evidence of Jehovah’s direction upon his organization was realized when the Squibb buildings became available. This complex of ten buildings comprises a total of 632,000 square feet of floor space and provided the immediate urgent relief needed. They are conveniently located between our present factory and the Bethel home, just two blocks north of 124 Columbia Heights. Within days after the purchase of the buildings they began to be used for much-needed storage of raw materials for the operation of the Society’s publishing plant. Presently several floors are being used to store paper rolls and other raw materials totaling 5,000 tons. Having a railroad siding right into the main building provides an ideal arrangement for receiving carloads of paper. Furthermore, the three bottom floors of the main building, comprising 80,000 square feet, are being prepared for moving all of our shipping department, both domestic and export, from the present location in our publishing plant to these three floors in the principal Squibb building. This will release much-needed space in the Adams Street factory for the manufacture of books and magazines.

However, in addition to manufacturing and storage area, we require space for living quarters. Hence, two buildings of the Squibb complex are presently under alteration to adapt them to residential use, thus providing living accommodations for 148 members of the Brooklyn headquarters family.

Since the west side of the Squibb buildings face the East River toward lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, it provides a most effective location for large signs. Among the signs is a large one with letters 6 to 8 feet high painted on the upper tower of one of the buildings and which reads “The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom.” On top of another one of the buildings is a large fifteen-foot-high neon, illuminated sign reading “Watchtower,” and it is visible over all of lower Manhattan’s Wall Street area. Complementing these signs is another most interesting one eight feet high by eighty feet long consisting of flashing electric light bulbs. This electric word-writing sign came with the building when we bought it. So we are putting it to use and can program the sign to rotate with a series of ten different slogans, each slogan changing every eight seconds. With this electrical light-bulb arrangement, the sign is clearly visible across the East River to lower Manhattan. Many of the brothers have commented how thrilling it is, when driving along the six-lane-wide Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan, to look across the East River and see these large illuminated electrical signs reading “Watchtower” and then underneath it different slogans, such as “Who Is God?” followed eight seconds later with the sign reading “Jehovah Is God.” These ten slogans run for a month. Then ten new ones are programmed. This provides an excellent opportunity to keep before thousands of people each day words of instruction and encouragement regarding Jehovah’s Word.

One can appreciate why we need all of this additional space when one realizes that the Bethel family has grown very rapidly. By the end of the service year of 1969, in Brooklyn, New York, there were 1,124 regular members of the family. Now, a year later, the average was 1,191, an increase of 67 workers at headquarters. Ten years ago there were 571 members in the family. The Bethel family has doubled since that time.

There are many other brothers who go to make up the family in New York. The Society operates three farms that keep the Bethel family supplied with food. We have 80 regular workers there, and during the year there were four temporary workers helping out.

Additionally, we have been doing a lot of reconstruction work in preparing the new buildings that were purchased on Columbia Heights, and in order to do this, 90 additional construction workers, along with their wives, have been brought in.

We are also building a new printing plant and Bethel home at Watchtower Farm, one hundred miles northwest of New York city and there we have another 84 temporary workers employed. So we can say that at the end of the year there were 1,449 members of the Bethel family serving in connection with the Brooklyn office. We also had 70 students of Gilead School with us, bringing the final total to 1,519.

In order to accommodate these people the Society had to lease three floors of the nearby Towers Hotel. This hotel is one block away from the Bethel home. During the months of September and October the Society thoroughly cleaned and painted all the rooms that were leased and we equipped the hotel rooms just as we fix up the rooms of the Bethel home. Approximately 250 brothers and sisters have been assigned to live there for the next two years. In the meantime we are working diligently, with the help of those brothers who have volunteered to do construction work, to remodel the buildings that we have purchased on the Heights. This is going along at a good pace. When all of this remodeling work is finished, which will take another year or more, we hope to move our brothers and sisters out of the Towers Hotel into permanent quarters, which are new additions to the Brooklyn Bethel home.

The new printing plant, 200 feet by 300 feet, now under construction at Watchtower Farm, should be completed around March 1, 1971, and shortly thereafter we expect to receive presses from the M.A.N. manufacturers in Germany. When these are installed we will begin operating this new printing plant. At the time of opening up this printing operation about sixty-five members of the Bethel family will be transferred from Bethel to Watchtower Farm, where the printing of some of the English-language magazines will be done. The magazines will be mailed from there to various parts of the United States.

There is another planned expansion going on too. The Society has in the designing stage a new large five-story Bethel home. This is to be built at Watchtower Farm. It will house about 350 people and will have a dining room and kitchen large enough to take care of more than 500 persons. It is hoped that in the spring of 1971 we will begin building this new Bethel home at Watchtower Farm, a building that will be approximately 250 feet long and 165 feet deep. When this building is finished and equipped, if it be Jehovah’s will, we will enlarge the new factory that we are now constructing by building a three-story addition right next to this new factory in an area covering about two more acres of land.

[Picture on page 63]

The New Watchtower Buildings and Their Signs as Viewed from Manhattan.

All of this vast expansion work has made us very happy here at Bethel, and we rejoice that Jehovah has given us the privilege of building more buildings and remodeling some of those that we have so that we can do our work more efficiently and be able to fill all the orders for literature that the congregations and branch offices send to Brooklyn each month.