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Like many, he had long yearned to move to the central office at Bethel. He lived in Brooklyn Heights from 1989 through 1994, though he was a Witness for much longer than that. "It was a little creepy" in the tunnels, Gregory Hall, a former JW who left the religion a couple of years ago, told Gothamist. The decommissioned tunnels are highlighted in this blueprint Gothamist received from the Dept. Those documents, along with conversations with several former Jehovah’s Witnesses and videos we were shown, offer a rare inside look at the tunnels, and provide insight into their purpose. This year, we received hundreds of pages of emails between the Witness leadership and the DOT, along with additional city records from the Municipal Archives. In 2017, Gothamist filed a FOIL request with the Department of Transportation to find out more about these subterranean passageways. And though the tunnels began to be filled in two years ago, their fascinating history has recently begun to come to light.
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Out of sight of most New Yorkers, though, was the development underground: a series of tunnels that ran beneath the streets to connect a number of the JW properties.
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Thousands of Witnesses from across the country came to volunteer at this center, which they called “Bethel," after " Beecher's Bethel," the former home of abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher that was part of the property. In the decades after 1909, when Jehovah's Witnesses founder Charles Taze Russell led the religious group from Pennsylvania to "America’s First Suburb," the Witnesses assembled a series of properties that ranged from an old carriage house on Willow Street to five-story brownstones and the expansive Kingdom Hall on Columbia Heights, along with other buildings (some of which would serve as their headquarters and printing plant). When the Jehovah's Witnesses moved out of Brooklyn Heights over the past few years, cashing in on their now-valuable properties and moving upstate, they left behind a collection of buildings that had been their headquarters for over a century.