• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 29, 2009

Head along Manhattan's West Side, down Ninth Avenue to the old Port Authority building. You will need a driver's license or some form of identification. Sign in at the guard station, slide through the teched-out turnstiles and ride up one of several elevators to the fourth floor. Welcome to Google.

Google's New York City office is home to 1,800 employees, about half engineers and half sales and marketing. Google occupies the entire fourth floor, half the eighth floor and small chunks of other floors, along with one floor in the Chelsea Market across the street.

In the old Port Authority building, which occupies an entire city block, Google has two cafeterias, one game room and about ten micro-kitchens with plastic bins full of packaged treats like M&Ms and gummy worms. Employees can feed their sugar rushes for free all day long.

Gummy worms notwithstanding, the cafeteria serves mostly healthy foods. Everything from tandoori chicken to sushi, complete with a fresh vegetable salad bar and vegan entrees, is also free. The café's beverages range from juices to mango and orange-infused water. For dessert? Oranges, bananas, apples, or small servings of cookies, cakes and other freshly baked treats.

Employees joke that no one sits more than 100 feet from something to nosh on, but that's a hard-and-fast rule. The free access to food has newbies watching their weight, and, like state-uni underclassmen, Googlers laugh about the Freshman 15.

Aside from food, Googlers have a well-known love of Legos. An area in the Manhattan office is dedicated to constructing elaborate works of art out of the colorful blocks: Everything from Lego skyscrapers to representations of Google's co-founders. After all, Larry Page once built a printer out of Lego blocks as a student, according to a Time magazine profile from 2006.

After a New York Times reporter wrote an article on the Lego obsession, Google engineer Martin Jansche made a 2D bar code design out of Legos. Take a picture of the 2D code with a Web-enabled camera phone and the browser opens to the May 19, 2008 Times article titled "Something Google Doesn't Want You to See."

The floor space Google occupies may seem more like a dormitory common area than the East Coast headquarters of one of the most powerful media companies in the world. The game room has easy chairs, ping-pong, and pool tables among other distractions. When New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff came to visit, he drew a character on the glass doors to the game room. Unfortunately, whoever cleans the doors clearly does not read the New Yorker, and the image is now gone.

But it's not all play and no work. Google believes that the culture they have created breeds creativity: It's constructive to let people think and work in a relaxing environment, and that includes giving people outlets to talk informally away from their desks. For example, programmers can discuss how to structure new products, from search to analytics, while playing a game of pool.

The open-area Manhattan office has quiet rooms with reclining chairs for alone time and telephone rooms for confidential conversations. And when that brilliant idea just can't wait, self-powered scooters get Googlers from one end of the building to the other in a jiff.

And while Mountain View has an on-site doctor available for walk-in check-ups, the Manhattan office does not. The New York facility also doesn't partake in some of the green initiates because Google doesn't own the building.

Instead of adding solar panels on the roof, as Mountain View did, the New York office promotes the Self-Powered Commuting program, which encourages Googlers to walk and bike by giving them "points," which can then be donated to charity. The company has also designated a room in the building to be used exclusively for bikes. But then again, maybe this is less about the environment and more about fighting off that candy weight.