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Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub
1sockchuck writes "Google will soon own one of the world's choice pieces of Internet real estate. The company has reportedly signed a contract to buy 111 8th Avenue in New York for an estimated $1.9 billion — or about $250 million more than Google spent to buy YouTube. The building serves as Google's main New York sales office, but is also one of the city's main telecom hotels, housing major data center operations for Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and dozens of network providers. Google currently has about 500,000 square feet of office space at 111 8th Avenue."
And the deal still left a portion of the ownership in the original investors' hands, so Google only bought about 89% of the building.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
They're getting more than just a building. There are other tenants that they will get rent from, and that is figured into the price.
Bigger view of the building built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
I haven't read the details about this deal but some of these numbers are big because they buy things with their own Google company shares/stock which I believe are valued considerably above their yield. Google shares/stock are many multiple times higher in value than equivalent stocks with the same dividends/returns. That's why these figures are so massive...maybe? Is it a cash purchase? YouTube wasn't.
Google is hated in that building by the other tenants and has gotten a bad reputation with the management, so buying the building solves both problems. Looks like nobody's going to be saying NO to Google over at the Old Port Authority Building anymore.
It's a former bus terminal so the floors in that building are very tall.
It actually used to be a Port Authority freight warehouse - not a bus terminal. Freight was transported to it via sub-street-level canals which was loaded onto trucks and driven around the floors for deposit. If look at the walls of any of the airshafts you could notice that the floors are over a foot thick of steel-reinforced concrete. It's a tank of a building.
For those using sensible units: 6800 USD/m2 or 5000 EUR/m2
Well, the rest of the galaxy uses the period and wavelength of the emissions from hydrogen plasma at the critical density to define distance and time, built around a natural logarithm scale. Why don't you get with the times and use an actually universal unit of measure, pitiful human?
[Okay, i have no idea what would be a good basis, nor do I know about critical densities of hydrogen plasmas, but that seems a better standard than "the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption it was a perfect sphere."]
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
111 Eighth also has a truck freight elevator, large enough to handle the largest step van . Tons of interconnected fiber throughout, meet-me-rooms every other floor, and just about every huge tele-media provider you can think of (Level 3, TelX, DRT, Deutch), once even Enron had an office back in the day.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
"actor inflects the verb" -- what does this even mean? Do you understand any of the terms you are using? I still vaguely get your point, but it's a dumb one and so is your faux-linguistic explanation of it.
The MTA museum offers these tours occasionally: http://mta.info/mta/museum/index.html. Keep an eye out for it. You can sleep on my couch if you want.
I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.