The Woolworth mansion, as seen in listing photos, is incredibly opulent but ultimately sold for $38 million, less than half the $90 million it had originally asked.
Photo: Modlin Group
Last month, when news broke that the Woolworth mansion at 4 East 80th Street had finally found a buyer, it was an event in and of itself. The Gothic-style townhouse just off Fifth Avenue spent 14.5 years on the market. But the identity of the buyer wasn’t clear, nor was the final purchase price after years of cuts (though a broker at the time said it was almost certainly under $40 million). Now public records show an LLC tied to the private family office of billionaire Leon Black paid $38 million, less than half the original $90 million asking price and $11 million less than it was most recently asking.
Black, the private-equity titan, owns another Upper East Side townhouse, the old Knoedler Gallery at 19 East 70th Street, which he and his wife, Debra, bought for $50 million in 2014 and hired Peter Marino to renovate. A broker who was not involved with the Woolworth deal told me he would be surprised if Black himself were the buyer — the Knoedler Gallery renovation was said to be a massively expensive undertaking that exceeded the sale price of the home. The mansion does seem to have sold to someone in Black’s family or inner circle, however: The deed lists the address of the buyer as that of Elysium Management, Black’s family office. Barry J. Cohen, the president of Elysium, signed the deed.
An entity tied to Leon Black’s family office is the buyer.
Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Neither the listing broker, Adam Modlin of Modlin Group, nor Carl Gambino of Compass, who represented the buyer, would comment on the sale. But Black has worked with a different Corcoran broker, Deborah Grubman, in the past, another indication that he may not be the buyer. It’s possible it’s one of his four children, though his daughter, Victoria, bought a $19.6 million townhouse not that far from the Woolworth mansion on East 81st Street last year. He also has three adult sons, one of whom could be behind the purchase.
Black co-founded Apollo Global Management in 1990 and led it until 2021, when he was pushed out over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Black paid Epstein $170 million in fees as a financial adviser for his family investment office, which manages his personal assets, starting in 2012, shortly after Apollo went public and Black’s personal wealth skyrocketed. Even as other onetime friends and associates distanced themselves from Epstein, Black continued to send him tens of millions annually for his services, as revealed by recently released emails from 2016 that show Epstein pressuring Black for additional payments.
The Woolworth mansion last traded hands in 1995, to Lucille Roberts, the women’s-only sports-club founder, and has been owned by her family since her death in 2003. It first listed for $90 million in spring 2012 — a sum the broker at the time argued was justified by its size (nearly 20,000 square feet) and recent renovation. But the limestone house, the middle in a row of three that Frank Woolworth built for his daughters shortly after the turn of the past century, is dauntingly opulent, done in an over-the-top style that few buyers today seek out, and its initial high asking price likely turned off some potential buyers when it first hit the market. The renovation is also now 30 years old and, according to a broker who toured the property, was never fully completed, with maids’ rooms upstairs and portions of the home used as offices under Roberts’s ownership. The home was rented on and off over the years it sat on the market, adding to the wear and tear.