The former owners of the huge New York City building was a consortium led by Taconic Investment Partners. They knew exactly how to make their property more attractive to important companies, and they did it by creating a ‘meet-me room’ (MMR) in the building for all its tenants to connect with one another and freely exchange data. This turned the 111 Eighth Avenue into one of the most important carrier hotels in the States. Now you see why Google wanted it so much.
Google moved into the building in 2006 and had plenty of time to ‘fall in love’ with it. We are talking about a 2.9 million square foot building, almost one million square feet more than the famous Empire State Building. It is so vast that it takes about twenty minutes to walk around it once.
The mammoth company only occupies about 500,000 square feet in the 111 Eighth Avenue, while other famous names like Nike, Sprint, Level3 or Verizon are tenants there. Google definitely must be happy with their $1.9 billion acquisition.
