‘Lax management and few rules’: Why Dumbo losing 10 Jay St. is bad news

Right on the waterfront, 10 Jay Street was a building known as a good starting place for new companies. No longer. By the end of 2014 the building was completely empty.

Demolition on the building began earlier this month, according to The Real Deal. Other than some floor-level retail, the building that will take its place will be residential, not commercial, meaning Brooklyn has lost one more property for housing startups, making it that much harder to keep tech companies here.
If you aren’t a person who thinks in street addresses, 10 Jay was the building right on the water, seated diagonally from The Brooklyn Roasting Company’s Dumbo location.
One of its amenities was lax management, as Tinybop’s Raul Gutierrez wrote in a recent email. His company now has its own space on Atlantic Avenue, but he remembers 10 Jay fondly:

10 Jay was a classic Brooklyn loft space. It was dirt cheap, had lax management and few rules. This allowed studios to build/reconfigure/paint/have large get-togethers etc., without any of the normal issues you’d have in a conventional office building. The building had no heat or cooling, leaky roofs, disgusting bathrooms, a painfully slow elevator and was generally mismanaged. The lack of rules gave creative people lots of leeway. Also despite the occasional chaos the building had spectacular views of the river and great light.

For example, check out the lofted workspaces in this nonprofit, Stoked, that once ran from inside 10 Jay. The organization has since moved up the street, to 68 Jay Street, which is also home to the DUMBO Startup Lab, The Atavist and Mouth.

The casual approach to running 10 Jay could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that its owners were moving toward plans to demolish it. The building’s current owners, Triangle Assets, along with its partner, Glacier Global Partners, had a glammed-out vision for the residential future of that space, but the city put the kibosh on its crystal-inspired design. The condo development is still moving forward, however. Triangle has owned the 180,000-square-foot former warehouse since 1994.
Neither Triangle nor Glacier were immediately available for comment for this story.
No word yet on what 10 Jay’s demolition means for DUMBO Beach.