For-sale signs have been affixed around what appears to be one of the last public outposts of the Nuwaubian Nation in Brooklyn; an ominous, windowless, sand-colored compound on 717 Bushwick Avenue affixed with equally large Egyptian imagery, cartoon-blue window panels and a huge ankh cross for much of the past decade.
“We’re just collecting offers,” says Tommy Ashley, who picked up the phone number listed on the signs, speaking on behalf of “United Sabaeans Worldwide,” which has been operating both the colorful building on the border between Bushwick and Bey-Stuy, as well as the next door gift shop and bookstore, where it goes by the name “All Eyes on Egipt.” The larger building goes by the name “Sanctuary of the Sabaeans,” as declared by a sign in front of that building’s imposing black doors. Both are taking offers, says Ashley.
Per Ashley, who calls himself an “in between” for the group and possible buyers, the group is not planning on closing down its operations in Bushwick just yet. Ashley declined to say how much the Sabaeans are seeking to sell the building for and says the group is only soliciting offers through him, by phone. No posting has been made online through a traditional broker.
He declined to say why the group is doing this now, before quickly hanging up.
A longtime subject of local curiosity, the building is all that remains of a miniature empire of some twenty or so buildings in Bushwick that were operated in the late 1970s and 1980s by Dwight York, a cult leader who espoused what the Southern Poverty Law Center, which catalogs the outfit as a “black supremacist” hate group, describes as “a disorienting mix of UFO theories, talk about the significance of Egypt and the pyramids, references to Atlantis, and retellings of stories from the Bible and other religious texts.”
Most of York’s operations in Bushwick had left by the 1990s, when the group started calling themselves the “United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors” and moved to a compound in Putnam County, Georgia, citing “rivalries with Islamic organizations in New York,” per a 1999 report in the New York Times. According to that story, the group was collectively of the belief, at least then, that a UFO from a faraway galaxy called Illyuwn was going “to visit Earth in 2003 and to take with it 144,000 chosen people.” While waiting in Georgia, the group built an enormous black and gold pyramid that could be seen from the highway, amid other, elaborately painted temples and colonnades. (“Mostly made of particle board, chicken wire, and artificial stucco,” says a later story in the Oxford American.) The group didn’t make it to 2003, however. By then, York had been arrested and, following a fourteen-day trial, given a 135 year prison sentence on accusations he ran the group as a front to coordinate his own “unlawful sexual activity with minors,” according to a ruling from a state appeals court in Georgia that affirmed the sentence in 2005. The government later seized his Georgia compound and the elaborate buildings “collapsed with just a tap,” as one report put it.
The smaller building in Bushwick, currently identifies as the headquarters of the Sabaeans’ sect of York’s Nuwaubian cult, operated at first, as it still does, as a small bookstore under the “Eyes on Egipt” name, described by a Vice blog post as “a Fisher-Price version of Cleopatra’s palace,” adjoining a large, windowless building, painted dark black. Sometime around 2017, it was painted its current desert yellow and the more elaborate “Egyptian” structure was suddenly built it, feel free to insert your own metaphor-of-aesthetic cheapness.
As it happens, the group in Bushwick still stand by York, currently an inmate at a federal maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado. “Malachi Z. K. York Will Be FREE,” reads a post on the Sabaeans’ website, which started circulating a renewed pledge to “Help Free an Innocent Man,” dated as recently as last year. The charges of pedophilia that are keeping him there, in which he is was accused of abusing children of cult members “as young as six years old,” according to court records, go unmentioned. Outside of Brooklyn, the larger Nuwaubian cult, operating these days under the name “Wu·Ṡabaṫ” appears to be still be moving steadily along the margins of society, opening their newest “Eyes on Egipt” bookstore in a strip mall in North Charleston, South Carolina earlier this year. The group did not return a request for comment about their plans to sell their building in Bushwick, and any inquiries can be directed toward Tommy Ashley himself.
Photos taken by Alec Meeker.
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