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Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Inside Bible House 1889-1908


Several in the comment trail and back-channel have enquired about the rooms inside the Bible House and asked if photographs exist.

With very grateful thanks to Bernhard (who has done all the work on this), below is a picture of the building along with seventeen extra photographs taken at the site prior to the move to Brooklyn in 1909. Ideally, you will need to transfer the graphic into a program like Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and then you can increase it to a readable size. You can also then select and separate the individual photographs if you wish.

Some additional comments about the second floor of the building will follow this.



The previous description of Bible House mentioned that the second floor was rented out for commercial purposes. This information came from Dr Leslie Jones (who produced the convention reports 1904-1916). His memories of visiting Bible House and the layout were written in 1929. However, it seems that only part of the floor was rented out because Watch Tower offices like the Colporteur Department were on this floor. Below is a picture of part of the second floor from both outside and inside the building to establish this.



However, a check of trade directories of the day show that various businesses, including insurance and music teaching, as well as some probably connected to CTR at some point, were also carried on from the Arch Street address. So it would seem the second floor was used by both the Watch Tower Society and other interests. With over 2500 square feet per floor it would be large enough to accommodate both.


4 comments:

Andrew Martin said...

Just incredible. Thanks for pursuing and posting these views I would have thought lost to history.

Miquel Angel Plaza-Navas said...

Excellent. Good work!

Leroy said...

Wow! This post is pure gold. I've wanted to see this "map" of the Bible house for ages. Thanks so much for sharing it!

Semer said...

Very nice job, thank you.