“Alphabet City” usually refers to the East Village of Manhattan neighborhood containing Avenues A, B, C and D. In 2017 and 2018, Google/Alphabet Inc. began buying up propertied in the Chelsea neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan. Steve Cuozzo wrote in the New York (NY) Post on March 1, 2018:
 
“Today, the trio forms a new ‘Alphabet City.’ Alphabet now also owns 111 Eighth and is the biggest tenant at 85 Tenth. Three buildings worth peanuts in the 1990s are valued at a combined nearly $5 billion. Erected during the time of steam trains and smoke-belching factories, they now herald Manhattan’s embrace of the digital age.”
 
Toronto, Ontario, the site of another Google/Alphabet Inc. neighborhood, has been called “Alphabet City” since at least October 2017.
 
           
Wikipedia: Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a corporate restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015 and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. The two founders of Google assumed executive roles in the new company, with Larry Page serving as CEO and Sergey Brin as President. It has over 80,110 employees as of December 2017.
 
Alphabet’s portfolio encompasses several industries, including technology, life sciences, investment capital, and research. Some of its subsidiaries include Google, Calico, Chronicle, GV, CapitalG, Verily, Waymo, X, Nest Labs and Google Fiber. Some of the subsidiaries of Alphabet have altered their names since leaving Google and becoming part of the new parent company—Google Ventures becoming GV, Google Life Sciences becoming Verily and Google X becoming just X. Following the restructuring, Page became CEO of Alphabet while Sundar Pichai took his position as CEO of Google.
 
Wikipedia: Alphabet City, Manhattan
Alphabet City is a neighborhood located within the East Village in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its name comes from Avenues A, B, C, and D, the only avenues in Manhattan to have single-letter names. It is bordered by Houston Street to the south and by 14th Street to the north, along the traditional northern border of the East Village and south of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Some famous landmarks include Tompkins Square Park and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
   
New York (NY) Post
How the birthplace of the Oreo became Google’s $2B food court
By Steve Cuozzo March 1, 2018 | 10:26pm
(...)
Chelsea Market spearheaded a vast neighborhood transformation. It prompted majority partner Jamestown and major New York landlord Taconic to buy massive but rotting 111 Eighth Ave. to the east in 1998 and set the stage for Google. It encouraged Cohen to buy underused 85 Tenth Ave. to the west in 2003.
 
Today, the trio forms a new “Alphabet City.” Alphabet now also owns 111 Eighth and is the biggest tenant at 85 Tenth. Three buildings worth peanuts in the 1990s are valued at a combined nearly $5 billion. Erected during the time of steam trains and smoke-belching factories, they now herald Manhattan’s embrace of the digital age
   
Twitter
Brian Schwagerl
@BrianSchwagerl
Great story of the Meatpacking District building about to turn into Google’s new Alphabet City.  https://lnkd.in/eFnarQg
12:54 PM - 2 Mar 2018
 
Twitter
Shelly Palmer
@shellypalmer
Is the Big Apple about to welcome ‘Alphabet City’? It looks like Google’s close to plunking down a cool $2.4 billion to buy a landmark building in NYC’s Meatpacking District that’s across the street from its current NYC HQ.
2:00 PM - 5 Mar 2018
 
The Columbian (Vancouver, WA)
Big Apple turning into tech hub
High-profile companies, including Google, grow in New York City
By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press
Published: March 12, 2018, 6:00 AM
NEW YORK — As New York City waits to hear whether it’s been chosen as the site for Amazon’s second headquarters, recent moves by another tech giant, Google, to expand its footprint in the city are helping to legitimize New York’s claim to be Silicon Valley East.
 
Google is reportedly close to a reaching a $2.4 billion deal to add a landmark Meatpacking District building to its already substantial New York campus.
(...)
Google already occupies another former Nabisco cookie factory west of Chelsea Market. Across the street from that factory, it has also announced plans to lease 320,000 square feet of space at Pier 57, an office and retail complex built on a pier over the Hudson River.
 
A New York Post real estate writer this week dubbed Google’s slice of Manhattan “Alphabet City,” a reference to the name of both Google’s parent company and a neighborhood on Manhattan’s east side.