If Google can make it here, it can make it anywhere. The company opens new digs in Manhattan.
After a year of speculation, the company has officially opened a new, bigger and more Google-y office in the Big Apple in the trendy Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan.
Google recently opened its new, 300,000-square foot, three-floor office in Manhattan Monday for its first official day of business, moved its more than 500 New York City employees into the new office at 111 Eighth Ave., and invited the press to take a sneak peek at its new digs.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has had employees in New York in advertising sales since 2000 and in engineering since 2003, but its new office is a step up, the firm said, and was built to its specifications.
The office, specially designed and built for Google, houses the company’s largest advertising sales team. And it is also home to the largest engineering group outside of the main office in Mountain View, Calif. “It is so big; you would not even need Google Maps to find it.”
Outgrew Old Digs
The company, which had occupied four floors of office space at 1440 Broadway in Times Square, has almost tripled the amount of square footage in its new location.
Google is leasing around 300,000 square feet of office space on three floors in a building that stretches from Eighth Avenue to Ninth Avenue and from 15th Street to 16th Street, a few blocks west of Union Square, Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger said.
“We outgrew our old space,” said Craig Nevill-Manning, the company’s engineering director.
But unlike its previous home in Times Square, most employees will be housed on one floor, which Nevill-Manning said will allow employees to collaborate on projects, accelerating development time and spurring innovation.
The office, which is Manhattan’s second largest commercial building, is located along the brick-covered streets of the former meat-packing neighborhood of New York–an area now overrun with up-scale bistros, bars and boutique hotels.
While Google is a global company with 8,000 employees throughout the world, New York City has become a key location–both in terms of generating revenue and developing new products. And the company is hoping to expand its headcount in the New York office during the next couple of years, executives said.
Google’s New York-based advertising team has been instrumental in securing big partnerships, including recent deals with MySpace and AOL, said Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising sales.
Google added an engineering staff to New York City in 2003. Since then, more than 100 engineering projects have been housed in New York, including: Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, parts of Google Checkout, Google Blog Search and Google Mobile Search.
Nevill-Manning, Google’s engineering director in New York; said that New York City is ripe with software engineering talent.
"There are great computer software engineers who do not want to move to California," he said. "So we are opening up facilities wherever there are great software engineers, including New York City, Bangalore and Tokyo."
Long-Term Lease
The office space was built to Google’s specifications and the company has a long-term lease, said Armstrong. He declined to say how long the lease was or how much the project cost.
The office space at 111 Eighth Ave., which real estate experts’ estimate is costing the company $10 million a year in rent, is similar in design and functionality to its headquarters in Mountain View.
Inside Google’s Manhattan Office
The workspace is light and airy and built around the concept of working in teams, with people sharing offices and cubicles connected in groups. This includes a fully equipped game room that would make any high school boy drool. Foosball, air hockey, ping-pong and pool tables are all available for employees to take a break and "blow off some steam." The room also has a video game area, bean bag chairs, massage chairs and even a full basketball hoop setup.
Just like employees in Mountain View, employees in the New York office also have free food available to them any time of day or night. There are several smaller kitchens throughout the main floor stocked with drinks, snacks and cereal. There is also a "micro-cafe" offering breakfast, lunch and dinner options. The company is also building a bigger cafeteria staffed with a full-time chef that will occupy an entire floor. It will open in November.
There also are a number of conference rooms named after New York landmarks including Alice Tully Hall, the Cloisters and the Apollo Theater.
The move to the new office space, which also happens to sit atop one of the largest fiber-optic crossroads for Internet and telephone communications in Manhattan, has spurred much speculation that Google is planning to build a massive data center. The idea is that Google could connect its servers directly into the fiber-optic communications network at 111 Eighth Ave., allowing the company to bypass networks owned and operated by the phone companies.
Nevill-Manning denied that the company’s new office will be used for anything other than software development and sales efforts.
“We have no plans to build a data center here,” he said. “We plan to fill this office with people, not machines. It is kind of expensive real estate for a data center.”