Google Opens NY Headquarters in Hudson Square

By: Ilana Siyance

On Monday, Google opened its New York headquarters in a repurposed 1930s railway terminus in Hudson Square.  As reported  by CNN, Google says the space is not only office space but is providing a new habitat for many kinds of vegetation and birds.  Being dubbed as a  “workplace designed for teams,”  the tech giant’s new North American headquarters is located at 550 Washington  Street. The 12-story St. John’s Terminal building, situated in close proximity to Hudson River Park, the West Village, SoHo and Tribeca, was redesigned by COOKFOX and Oxford Properties.

The 1.7-million square foot Google complex includes 1.5 acres of street-level  vegetation, rail bed gardens and terraces that are 95% made up of plants native to the state of NY.  The project has created a habitat which has attracted and become home to over 40 bird species, “including birds fueling up for a trans-Atlantic migratory flight,”  wrote Google’s president for Americas and Global Business, Sean Downey, in an open  letter on Wednesday.

“It’s actually re-knitting the ecosystem, from the insects to the birds,” Rick Cook, a founding partner at CookFox Architects,  one of the design firms who worked on the project, said in an introductory video published by Google.  The interiors were designed by international architecture studio Gensler, to offer flexible work arrangements post-Covid, encouraging connection and innovation, and to entice workers back into the office.  “If you’re going to make that commute in, it should be because you can work with people that have passion, that have ideas, that you can sit next to and come up with something that you couldn’t do just on your own,  and that’s really the vision of this space,” said Downey in a video introducing the new campus.

Google had purchased the former fright facility in 2022 for $2.1 billion, after having leased space there starting in 2019.  This building is the company’s largest, besides the California headquarter, and will serve as a headquarters for Google’s Global Business Organization, which includes the company’s sales and partnership teams.  Per CNN, the building has space for roughly 3,000 workers and is organized into 60 “neighborhoods” for teams of about 20 to 50 people per group. Employees are not assigned fixed desks or permanent seating, but rather are encouraged to use flexible seating areas or shared spaces including lounges, cafes,  terraces and micro-kitchens.

“Creativity wants to move around, so we’ve created as much common spaces as we have neighborhood space, if not more,  for people to meet, to work, to collaborate,” Jennifer  Kelly, a vice president of workplace experience, said in the same introductory video. “Some feel like a library, some feel like a coffee shop, so people have options to use spaces that they feel most comfortable in.”

Google currently employs over 14,000 people in New York, up from 7,000 when it had first announced the St. John’s Terminal project in 2018.  This higher number of employees is even after the announced layoffs of 2023, and after Google’s parent, Alphabet, also cut about 12,000 jobs — roughly 6% of its previous workforce — in early 2023.  Google also recently converted the nearby Chelsea Market into retail and office space, having moved into offices on some of the building’s second, third, fourth, seventh, and eighth floors.  The company had purchased that entire Chelsea Market complex in 2018 for $2.4 billion, per CNN.