The Gothic exterior, as shown in listing photos, bears a resemblance to the Woolworth Tower downtown, also designed by a Cass Gilbert and built at the same time.
Photo: Modlin Group

It took 14.5 years and a price cut of some 50 percent from its original $90 million ask, but the Woolworth mansion at 4 East 80th Street has finally found a buyer. As The Real Deal reported, the Gothic-style mansion is now in contract after being relisted last year for just under $50 million. The house, which is situated in the middle of a row of three townhouses that five-and-dime king Frank Winfield Woolworth built for his daughters, is the grandest of the three, and the one most like Woolworth’s own Upper East Side mansion, since demolished to make way for 990 Fifth Avenue, a Rosario Candela–designed apartment building.

Certainly the asking price, but also the design of the mansion may have had something to do with its long-delayed sale. “The pool of buyers for this type of very specific architecture is super, super limited,” said a broker. The seven-story, nearly 20,000-square-foot house, whose dark limestone façade the New York Times once described as looking “a bit like an expertly dripped sand castle,” is almost dauntingly opulent. There’s a dining room that seats 50, 14-foot ceilings on the parlor level, a wood-paneled library that runs the width of the house, three kitchens, massive stone fireplaces, and a baronial staircase dotted with busts. It’s like living in an English manor but a quarter block from Fifth Avenue.

The wood-paneled library is one of the opulent, turn-of-the-century spaces in the mansion. Though lovely, the spaces are not modern.
Photo: Modlin Group

While it may not be to everyone’s taste, the house’s history as part of a family compound is highly unusual in Manhattan, as Christopher Gray noted in a 2009 Times column. (Of the handful of collections that were built, for the Phelps, Dodge, and Brokaw families, for example, only a few remain). It bears a resemblance to the Woolworth building in Tribeca — hardly a coincidence as both the skyscraper and the three sisters’ houses were designed by Cass Gilbert, and built at the same time as the Woolworth building. No. 4 was built for daughter Helena McCann, while the more austere marble houses on either side belonged to her sisters, Edna Hutton and Jesse Donahue. But Donahue’s house, No. 6, is considered by many to be the most attractive, leading to a rumor that she was the favorite daughter, although it was clearly McCann who shared her father’s taste in architecture.

Most recently, the house belonged to Lucille Roberts, founder of the women’s-only sports clubs, who bought it from the Young Men’s Philanthropic League for $6 million in 1995. (It was, apparently, being used as a men’s gym at the time.) During her renovation, Roberts put a gym and sauna on the sixth floor (getting up there must have been a workout in itself, though there is an elevator), and lived there until her death in 2003. Her family has been trying to sell it since 2011, periodically dropping the price, renting it out, and relisting it. Even the rental price dropped, from $210,000 in March 2011, when it first listed, to $80,000 in 2021.

The home, which is filled with period furniture, as shown in this listing photo of an entertaining room and the grand staircase, has been rented on and off for the last 14 years.
Photo: Modlin Group

While the house was listed with Adam Modlin, of the Modlin Group, for $49.95 million, according to a broker with knowledge of the listing, it likely sold for about $10 million less than that, as the sellers were considering an offer in the high $30 million range over the summer. (That deal fell through, I was told, but it’s unlikely to have fetched more than $40 million.) Modlin himself did not respond to a request for comment. Brown Harris Stevens broker Paula del Nunzio, who had the listing when it first came on the market in 2011 for $90 million, defended its unheard-of price at the time, noting that it was both massive and renovated — an unusual combination, but this broker said that not all of it was move-in ready; Roberts also used part of the house for offices and there are still a number of small maids rooms upstairs. Now it’s been 30 years since Roberts bought the place and renters have been in and out of for more than a decade. “It needs a complete overhaul. Frankly it’s super dated, very dark, very old,” the broker said.

The mansion, at 4 E. 80th Street, is in the middle of a row of three built for Frank Woolworth’s daughters.
Photo: Courtesy NYPL

The high initial price also likely dissuaded buyers at first. To this day, no townhouse has cracked $90 million — hedge-funder Philip Falcone’s doublewide townhouse on East 65th Street, set the townhouse record in 2019 at nearly $80 million, which has yet to be surpassed. More recently, Eliot Spitzer’s plans to put up a new Fifth Avenue tower basically right next door at 985 Fifth probably drove away some others. Although living with the hassle of high-rise construction nearby is more palatable at the lower price point.

Over the years, No. 2 became a co-op with a weathered exterior and No. 6’s marble remained pristine under the ownership of philanthropist Fred Koch. The McCann family held onto their house the longest, but it seemed to lend itself more to institutional than domestic use, and McCann’s heirs sold off No.4 to the Holy Cross Fathers in 1943 (it was used for Catholic novitiates), who sold it to the Philanthropic League about a decade later, who owned it from the 1950s until 1995, when it went to Roberts. It’s unclear who the new owner is — the sale has yet to hit city records — but it seems that the mansion’s time as the fanciest rental in New York is over.

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