Brooklyn’s famed Watchtower buildings never became offices — and may now turn into housing

A famed complex of buildings located next to the Brooklyn Bridge may become home to a batch of new apartments.

Curbed reports 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.

The Jehovah’s 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.

Nothing yet is set in stone — though local residents told Curbed they’re 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.

In 2016, the CIM Group — along with LIVWRK and the Kushner Companies — 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.

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’ plans to create a thriving Brooklyn office market, which included the “F train tech corridor.”

Now CIM, which bought out the two other partners in 2018, sees current demand for something else: housing along Brooklyn’s most prime stretch of waterfront.

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.

One extra floor would be added to the 13-story 30 Columbia Heights — bringing its height to 14 levels — and five would be tacked atop the 12-story 25 Columbia Heights, raising it to 17 floors.

These proposed additions would boost the existing 700,000-square-foot sprawl to an 831,000-square-foot total.

CIM has only just begun the process known as ULURP — the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure — which takes about seven months after submission.