It Follows

We had accidentally taken the elevator to the wrong floor, mindlessly tailing two fashion-forward folks—Margiela tabis and statement eyewear—to seven when the Available Works art book fair was actually on four. I had assumed that the hip kids flocking to the slightly dour office building on a Sunday night would all be going to the same destination, but what did I know?

“That’s why you shouldn’t just follow people,” one of my fellow fairgoers joked as we waited for the elevator back down. In fact, I had just followed the building itself on Instagram, its feed a heavy dose of ritzy ’80s inspo alongside swanky soirées. Recently rebranded as WSA—short for Water Street Associates, not to be confused with the accountants or utility company of the same name—the FiDi tower was originally designed by FX Collaborative in 1984, back when they were known as Fox & Fowle, as the headquarters of NatWest Bancorp. 175 Water St subsequently served as AIG’s headquarters for two decades before turning over a couple of times—with an aborted Gensler-designed office-to-resi scheme along th…