For sale signs have been posted around what appears to be one of the Nuwaubian Nation’s last public outposts in Brooklyn; an ominous, windowless, sand-colored building at 717 Bushwick Avenue that has been sporting equally large Egyptian motifs, cartoon-blue windowpanes, and a giant ankh cross for much of the past decade.
“We’re just collecting offers,” says Tommy Ashley, who answered the phone number listed on the signs, speaking on behalf of United Sabaeans Worldwide, which operates both the colorful building on the border of Bushwick and Bey-Stuy and the gift shop and bookstore next door, where it’s called All Eyes on Egypt. The larger building is called Sanctuary of the Sabaeans, a sign outside the building’s imposing black doors proclaims. Both are accepting offers, Ashley says.
The group has no plans to stop its operations in Bushwick yet, according to Ashley, who describes himself as a “middleman” between the group and potential buyers. Ashley would not say what price the Sabeans plan to sell the building for, and says the group is only soliciting offers by phone through him. No offers have been posted online through a traditional broker.
He wouldn’t say why the group was doing this now before quickly hanging up.
The building, long a subject of local curiosity, is the only remnant of a miniature empire of about 20 buildings in Bushwick operated in the late 1970s and 1980s by Dwight York, a cult leader who espoused what the Southern Poverty Law Center, which catalogs the group as a “black supremacist” hate group, describes as “a disorienting mix of UFO theories, talk of 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 activities in Bushwick had disappeared by the 1990s, when the group began calling itself the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and moved to a compound in Putnam County, Georgia, citing “rivalry with Islamic organizations in New York,” according to a 1999 report in the New York TimesThere, the group built a huge black and gold pyramid that could be seen from the highway, amid other elaborately painted temples and columned halls (“Mostly made of particle board, wire mesh and fake stucco,” according to a later story in the Oxford Americans) and lasted for about a decade before York was arrested in 2002. After a 14-day trial, he was sentenced to 135 years in prison. He was accused of operating the group as a front for his own “unlawful sexual activities with minors,” according to a Georgia state appeals court ruling that upheld the conviction in 2005. The government later seized his Georgia estate, and the elaborate buildings “collapsed with a simple blow,” one report said.
The smaller building in Bushwick, currently the headquarters of the Sabaean sect of the Nuwaubian cult from York, was initially operated—and still is—as a small bookstore called “Eyes on Egypt,” and was described in a Vice blog post as “a Fisher-Price version of Cleopatra’s palace.” It adjoins a large, windowless building painted dark black. Sometime around 2017, it was painted its current desert yellow, and suddenly the more elaborate “Egyptian” structure was erected. Feel free to use your own metaphor for aesthetic cheapness.
In fact, the group in Bushwick still stands behind York, who is currently incarcerated in a maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. “Malachi ZK York will be FREE,” reads a post on the Sabaeans’ website, which circulated a renewed pledge to “Help Free an Innocent Man” dated just last year. There is no mention of the pedophilia charge that is keeping him there, in which he is accused of molesting children of cult members “as young as six years old,” according to court records. Outside of Brooklyn, the larger Nuwaubian cult, which these days operates under the name “Wu·Ṡabaṫ,” still seems to be moving steadily on the fringes of society, opening its newest bookstore, “Eyes on Egypt,” in a North Charleston, South Carolina, strip mall earlier this year. The group did not respond to a request for comment on its plans to sell its Bushwick building, and all inquiries can be directed to Tommy Ashley himself.
Photos by Alec Meeker.
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