Google Eyeing Another Major New York City Office Expansion

Google is reportedly close to either buying or leasing Oxford Properties’ massive office project at St. John’s Terminal, a sign that it is accelerating its growth in New York City.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is also adding 300K SF to Chelsea Market, the Wall Street Journal reports. With those two locations, plus the approximately 250K SF it is taking at Pier 57, the tech giant may have space for as many as 20,000 employees. The New York Post first reported Google's interest in St. John's Terminal.

Google's New York operations are based at 111 Eighth Ave., a monolithic office building for which it paid $1.9B in 2010. It spent $2.4B to buy Chelsea Market from Jamestown earlier this year. 

Right now, Google has around 7,000 employees in the city, according to the Journal, but if the reported plans come together, it will bring the company into the realm of Amazon, which is reportedly weighing bringing 25,000 employees to Long Island City as part of its HQ2 campus.

Amazon already employs over 1,000 people in the city, and while its employment centers are on the Far West Side and, possibly, Queens, connected by the 7 train, Google's operations could run a straight line from Meatpacking through Chelsea and ending in Hudson Square, appropriately at the terminal that once was the end of the High Line railroad.

Oxford released renderings for the planned redevelopment of the 1.3M SF St. John’s Terminal building, at 550 Washington St., last month. It paid $700M for the property last year, and brought on Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a joint venture partner in February.

The rebuild is due to be complete in 2022.