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 the way (in 2019, before it was cool)—eventually ending up in the hands of a quiet investor known as 99c LLC in late 2022.

The current owners of 161 Water Street (the rebranding extends to the building’s address) have leaned into its pomo heritage, a counterpoint to developer Paramount Group’s wanton destruction of Roche and Dinkeloo’s gloriously outré atrium over at 60 Wall Street. @WSANYC bills the thirty-one-story, 685,000-square-foot building as “a modern workspace for the fashion, arts, culture, and technology industries.” The slick, aspirational bent is presumably due to the influence of tenant Something Special Studios, the ad agency that organized the book fair, which debuted in the same space in September. Word-of-mouth had attracted well-heeled scenesters to the closing moments of the weekend-long fair; I myself discovered it through a friend who was among the forty exhibitors.

The floor was populated with Memphis-era deadstock, alongside more contemporary pieces such as Jumbo’s instantly iconic Snow Fence Chair. Rough-and-ready scaffolding formed rude space-dividers amid unfussy USM Haller tables laden with obscure printed matter. Oversized cardboard architectural models by artist Kambel Smith softened all those sharp edges, while Russell E. L. Butler spun a pitch-perfect soundtrack of deep-house selections.

I made my rounds, pausing to peruse a rare Albert Kahn monograph, a chapbook of Pentagram logos, vintage MoMA catalogs, and other rarities similarly inscribed with triple-figure prices. Besides books, vendors were also hawking records, posters, and hipster accouterments (obligatory dad caps). Before I knew it, it was closing time: Shoppers made last-minute purchases and exhibitors packed up, broke down, loaded out. Butler closed their set with a remix of Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be”; I finally found my friend LinYee as the dulcet tones of the 1994 hit faded out. I asked for her take on the event. “It was great to be with people in person,” she enthused. “Someone told me they’d been following MOLD”—the food-and-design magazine she founded and edits—“for years, and I was like, ‘how did you find us?’”

Only later did I see an email from the building’s access control software (I’d had to sign in on an iPad in the lobby) informing me that I’d earned a stamp from WSA, and that I’d receive a new one each time I visited. Apparently, the building was now following me.