Watchtower neighborhood carefully planned for Etsy (and future Etsies)

Lots more details about the new tech campus built on the old Jehovah’s Witnesses properties overlooking Dumbo have come out. The details come by way of the New York Observer’s Commercial Observer, a real estate news source owned by one of the developers of the Dumbo project, Jared Kushner.

At the heart of the story: the importance of Etsy being at the center of the deal.

We covered Etsy’s initial announcement of its 200,000-square-foot, 10-year lease.

The main takeaways from the new piece are these:

• We’ve written about lackluster Internet access in New York City. This project has been planned with more than enough fiber to meet current and future needs.
• Etsy is playing a big role in curating the overall project, with special emphasis in what goes into various ground floor retail spaces. The company wants the retail element to serve both its employees and its neighbors well.
• Lastly, Etsy took a whole building: 117 Adams (right in between the exit points of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges — we hope there’s good soundproofing).

From the Commercial Observer story:

“We were in an active property search and evaluation for a long time,” Josh Wise, Etsy’s director of facilities, said. “We were out, engaged and looking at everything you can think of. Just [considering] square footage and opportunities for laying out the kind of space we wanted to lay out, it narrowed the field fairly quickly.” As it was started in a Fort Greene apartment, Etsy was dead set on keeping its headquarters in Brooklyn. When Dumbo Heights presented up to 1.2 million square feet, Etsy jumped at the opportunity to take an entire building—117 Adams.

It’s too bad that the new tech hub has to come saddled with one of those empty developer names, when it could have come up with a name on its own, one with some historical legitimacy. For example, “Watchtower.”