From a Starbucks to a $1.9 Billion Office: Google's Big New York Bet

Google's New York story began in 2000 with a single employee working out of a Starbucks on 86th Street — what the company later called "a scrappy, highly-caffeinated sales 'team.'"

A decade later, that team had grown past 2,000 people, and Google needed a building to match. In December 2010 it announced the purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue, an 18-story Art Deco tower in Chelsea, from a partnership of Taconic Investment Partners, Jamestown Properties, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund.

Google didn't disclose the price, but the New York Post put it at $1.77 billion — $1.9 billion once transfer taxes and fees were counted. That made it one of the largest single-building commercial deals in American history at the time, and a striking statement of intent: the search company was planting a flag in Manhattan.

"We believe that this is a great real estate investment in a thriving neighborhood and a fantastic city," said David Radcliffe, Google's vice president for real estate, in the company's announcement. He also noted the New York office had grown from that one person in a Starbucks to "more than 2,000 Googlers working on a variety of projects in both sales and engineering — and we're hiring across the board."

The building itself was a fit for a technology company: backup generators, heavy electrical capacity, antennas, fiber optics — the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps a digital giant running.

Fifteen years on, the bet looks obvious. In 2010 it looked audacious: a company born in a garage, barely a decade old, spending nearly two billion dollars on bricks and mortar. Google's New York office would go on to become its largest outside California. It all started in a coffee shop.