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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

The deal involves 2.5 million square feet of office space. In comparison, the Empire State Building has 2.2 million square feet. So this is a pretty big deal. (I'm trying to imagine what Mountain View would look like with the Empire State Building beside 101.)

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Coincidentally, LinkedIn's NY offices are _in_ the Empire State Building.

http://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-tour-through-linkedins...

And 111 Eighth Avenue, Google’s NYC headquarters, is 2.9 MM square feet (I think Google only occupies about a third of the building so far).

I work there. They've expanded a lot. If my reckoning is right Google occupies 8/15 floors completely, and occupy fractions of a couple more floors.

As of last year (when I worked there), 8 was a pass-through floor mostly occupied by ISPs. 15/9/10 should be done by now, though.

Is the rest of it empty or do they rent it?

Their tenants include Nike, Deutsch Inc, Bank of New York and Barnes & Noble. They also donated space for Cornell NYC Tech to hold classes there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue#Google

Oh man. One of my favorite memories was the look on the Internap security guy's face when we parked a 19ft box truck at their loading dock on the 10th floor of the Port Authority building. "the truck is WHERE?"

I guess it's parking space that's the reason for why SV office spaces don't go very high vertically?

Zoning. Going higher doesn't change your parking needs.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2011/09/19/zoning-law...

Going higher would generally mean you need more parking for the amount of land the building takes up.

Sure, but you're building on a dramatically smaller piece of land so your total overall parking requirement doesn't change. 4 stories of 100,000sqft vs 40 stories of 10,000sqft hold the same number of workers, but the tower only uses 1/10th of the footprint.

The fun part is when you start building a lot of these towers very close to each other and then all of a sudden your parking needs plummet because transit is way more effective.

It's not going to happen in the Valley though, they're stuck with gross office parks.

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