Inside the Google NYC LEGO and Tech Fantasy Land [PICS]


Google Logo in LEGO




Click here to view this gallery.

Tour Googles sprawling Mountain View, CA, campus and as you ogle the colors, great employee facilities and sense of whimsy, youll think, Why cant more offices be like this? In reality, at least one of them can. Its Googles second largest office, not in California, but instead nestled among the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

The company calls this facility Google NYC, and it is big and surprisingly entertaining for a corporate office where 2,500 employees work on everything from Google Search and Ads to Google Maps, Docs and more. In fact, Google told Mashable that the office is host to the second-largest number of Google engineers in the company (you can guess where the rest of them are).

Google inhabits multiple floors of the downtown building and the one Mashable visited covers an entire city block. Its so large that areas have been given special names so people can keep track of where they are and where theyre going. To get from one place to another, many employees use one of the hundreds of Razor scooters on the floor. As you would expect, theres ample free food and lots of unusual places to sit, meet and read. On the day we visited, there was what looked like a lunch counter facing a cooking show/music recital set where one seat was reserved for Yo Yo Ma (yes, the Yo Yo Ma) who was visiting that day.

One entire wall is devoted to LEGO art and LEGO creation. It was a struggle not to stop, stay and play. Theres even a ladder to climb from one floor to the other.

The company is by no means new to New York. It arrived here way back in! 2000, w hen Google was just two years old, and opened this office in 2006. In 2008, Google bought out an abandoned Oreo factory (yes, the Oreo cookie was invented there) on Chelsea Piers and established a second New York Office, just down the block from the first one.

Mashable got a quick tour of Google NYC, a place full of classic tech and LEGO whimsy. The gallery offers just a glimpse of what we found. See if you can guess the names of the classic computers before looking at each caption.

More About: apple, Classic Tech, Google, Lego, Search, Texas Instruments


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