DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — ONLY ONE BIDDER showed interest in the historic Hotel Bossert at an auction held at Kings County State Supreme Court on Thursday, according to The Real Deal. Investment firm Beach Point Capital won a foreclosure auction for the Chetrit Group’s Hotel Bossert, another chapter in a financial and renovations saga that has been ongoing for more than a decade. The lender used its existing $177 million debt to submit a credit bid of $120 million for the Brooklyn Heights hotel, at the southeast corner of Montague and Hicks streets.
Joseph Chetrit and David Bistricer had in 2013 purchased the 14-story building from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, when the real estate-savvy religious denomination moved its world headquarters upstate to Warwick in Orange County. At the time, Chetrit and Bistricer promised to restore the hotel to its former glory. They ran into repeated financial difficulties with loans they had obtained for renovations. In 2019 Chetrit bought out Bistricer’s interest in the building, but then saw the building go into special mortgage servicing. After the collapse of arrangements to prevent foreclosure, the building, which is still in sore need of repair, was auctioned to Beach Point on Thursday.
The hotel has a storied history from when lumber merchant Louis Bossert built it in 1909. The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society purchased the building in 1983 for its membership. During that time, the Watchtower maintained the building so well that the Bossert won a Lucy G. Moses Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy. The Witnesses also kept good relations with some of the longtime (and elderly) tenants, according to a New York Magazine article.
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