Things are rough on the old Ambassador Campus. With the gargantuan condos being built the present property owners are having a hard time selling Ambassador Hall and Terrace Villa.
It is time for all of you wanna-be cult leaders to buy one of Herb's original buildings and start the great work all over again!
This is the perfect place for Almost Arrested Elisha Elijah Joshua Amos Doubly Blessed Bob Thiel and Chief Pharisee James Malm to join ranks and start the greatest work ever!
Pasadena’s Gilded Age Merritt mansion lists for $7.9M
After Merritt died in 1956, the estate was purchased by Ambassador College, a school run by the Worldwide Church of God through 1990 that had once had some very cool midcentury buildings on its campus. (They’ve since been demolished.) The mansion is now owned by City Ventures, an Orange County-based developer.The Merritt residence measures over 17,000 square feet, and includes seven bedrooms but somehow only three bathrooms. The few interior photos available hint at just how mind numbingly decadent this place must have been back in its heyday. The house has retained its original mahogany wood paneling on the first and second floors and its private sunken garden, says the listing. The house also contains an indoor swimming pool, perfect for your Great Gatsby parties.The property’s landscaped was previously reported to have been designed by noted landscape designer Garrett Eckbo, though the current listing makes no mention of Eckbo.The Merritt estate listed for $9.95 million last year. Now it’s had a price chop to $7.9 million. LA Curbed
The splinter group will need to be large and the members prosperous because to maintain the property alone will be daunting. Envision every Sunday being a work party for the cult members: The men can clean and groom the grounds while the women work in the kitchen to prepare lunch and snacks.
ReplyDeleteOf course, with only two bathrooms (or is it three?), it's going to be challenging to for the cult member workers to take bathroom breaks. Perhaps the clean up / construction crew and amateur landscapers can get some industrial portapotties.
Then there's the property tax and the various other taxes local governments seem to want to levy with wild abandon. Those members of the cult had better have lots of money and be real generous or this white elephant is going to sink the ship.
What we can all hope is that this property will bankrupt sect after sect of the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia so that each group will fade out of existence like the smile of a disappearing Cheshire Cat in through the Looking Glass.
Perhaps you can grab the name of your sect before anyone else takes it: BCoG, for Bankrupt Church of God... but then that might be redundant....
Perhaps an entrepreneurial investor will see the potential and set it up as a timeshare, or provide splinter sub-lets.
ReplyDeleteWork parties consisting of volunteers from the L.A. church did occasionally assist the AC Gardening Crew in weeding the dichondra lawns back when I was a student. The grounds for all of the mansions on Orange Grove + the library required an incredible amount of upkeep. That was before there were extensive pollution controls on cars, and on the worst smoggy days, you'd feel as if you'd smoked 2 or 3 packs of cigarettes after 8 hours on the gardening crew, which is what most of us put in on a typical Sunday. Sometime during the first week of my Freshman year, I became aware that there were actually mountains a couple of miles to the north of Pasadena. We suddenly had a relatively smog-free day, and there they were!
ReplyDeleteIf these buildings were in Beverly Hills, there would be wider interest in them. The areas surrounding them were of mixed affluence even in the 1960s. I really liked some of the funky old buildings that were torn down to make way for the Hall of Administration, and for Herbie's last erection (Auditorium).
BB
Isn't it interesting that Herbie was going all out to complete the Auditorium before 1975. I've read that he even insisted that the workman work on Saturdays to complete the project. Did Herbie correctly perceive that members would leave and withdraw their financial support after 1975?
ReplyDeleteIt will sell when the price is right.
ReplyDeleteOnce they lower the price to an appropriate value, they'll have no problem selling.
It's as simple as that!
Perhaps they had it priced high, hoping to entice an ex-WCG sucker who'd be adding 'sentimental value'.
Or maybe it's the perfect opportunity for Japanese and Chinese investors.
ReplyDeleteMikey, a Japanese organization purchased the famed Huntington Sheraton Hotel, Pasadena, back in the early 1980s. Shortly thereafter, extensive structural damage was discovered by inspectors, no doubt from the cumulative effects of earthquakes, and parts of it were condemned. The cost of the work required to bring it back up to standards was in the millions! The investors really took a bath.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, anyone purchasing older buildings in Southern California would do their due diligence before buying! Especially if a snake oil salesman had owned the property before!
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