A Lego artwork by Sean Kenney, commissioned by Google, at the Internet company’s Chelsea offices.So, City Room can do our version of bloggy investigative reporting, too.
Google loves Lego. After all, Larry Page built a printer out of Lego blocks when he was a student. Google honored Lego’s 50th birthday with its own illustrated Google Lego logo (which an inspired fan turned into a real Google Lego logo).
Google’s New York offices even commissioned a Lego artist, Sean Kenney, to do a piece that seemed simple from afar, but more complex as you got close. And Google’s first disk drives (before the turn of the millennium) were all modded out with the colorful building blocks; the cases that were sold at the time were really expensive. (Interesting fact: Back then, Google was too cheap to buy real Lego blocks; they were actually generic Costco building blocks, but they were Lego-like in spirit.)
So it’s no wonder, perhaps, that the Chelsea offices of Google — which we have visited several times and where the cafeterias serve free lunches — have a whole area devoted to elaborately constructed works made of Lego blocks. Impressed, this City Room reporter wanted to write an article about them.
A replica of the Chelsea building where Google’s New York offices are housed. Enlarge this image. 
We thought it wouldn’t be a problem. Google officials discourage photography in their offices, but they had been eager enough to brag about their Chelsea space in The Times’s dead-tree editions in the past. And some lower-quality photos of the Google Lego creations already were already out on the Internet.
First we sent a polite request through a friend to Google’s local P.R. office, and were “ix-nayed,” as the friend informed us.
Hmm. Odd. But then this City Room reporter bumped into Employee No. 3 (yes, as in the first person hired after Larry and Sergey) and asked him to put in a request to the P.R. department again. Perhaps a request from on high, could gets things moving. The person who answered his request initially seemed very nice, but then we got an e-mail message back:
We get many requests from the media for photographs of various locations in our office, including the Lego area. Unfortunately, aren’t able to say yes to all of them.
Ouch! Disappointed but not deterred, City Room has stealthily waited for high-quality photos of the Google creations to come our way.
Lego portraits of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as computer scientist Brian Kernighan, at the Chelsea office. Enlarge this image. 
And we finally obtained some images of the most elaborate Lego art, including portraits of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Brian Kernighan. (If you have to ask who Brian Kernighan is, you are not meant to be a Google engineer.) We also obtained an image of the Lego representation of the Chelsea office building in which Google’s New York offices are housed.
The building was actually constructed by an engineer named Mike Epstein (who was not our source for the photos). It took him a few late nights, with help from some co-workers.
The Google logo by Sean Kenney, pictured above (and not to be confused with other Google Lego logos), was installed in April 2007 and is made up of 5,300 Lego pieces of more unusual nature than the square blocks.
(To be safe, we didn’t have any of these pictures e-mailed to any of our Gmail accounts. You never know who is watching you.)
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