A Fidi Office Building With a Wait List
Most people find new office space on a tour with a commercial broker or by trawling websites featuring photos and floor plans. Not the tenants at 161 Water Street. They were recruited. The editor of Office Magazine met the management team at a dinner in Paris. Devin B. Johnson, a figurative painter, was tapped by an art curator. Many more learned about the building while vacationing in the Cayman Islands — specifically, while vacationing at Palm Heights, a beachfront hotel run by the British couple Matthew and Gabriella Khalil. “I would have never ever, never ever thought that I would end up here,” said Michael Goldberg, who leads the marketing firm Something Special Studios and recently moved in his staff from the Lower East Side after connecting with the Khalils at Palm Heights. “Fidi wasn’t exactly an area I was targeting.”
161 Water Street, a 700,000-square-foot, 31-story tower being rebranded as WSA, for Water Street Associates, is in one of the least alluring parts of the Financial District — a wide, windblown stretch where its corporate neighbors include S&P Global and EmblemHealth. Even here, the building is particularly corporate, a 1982 temple of reddish marble and curving tinted glass. Then there’s the building’s past. It’s better known by its former address, 175 Water Street, which it went by as the headquarters of AIG, the insurer that backed subprime mortgages, got bailout money, and then handed out bonuses to its executives.
