Despite an aggressive years-long marketing campaign, no buyer has been found for the penthouse of New York City’s Woolworth Building. The luxury apartment, available since 2014 and marketed actively since 2017, has returned to the market with a whopping $31 million discount.
Now listed for $79 million, the top five floors of the building were first listed by real estate developer Ken Horn for $110 million in 2014. He designed the apartment to exceed everyone’s imagination of New York luxury — a unit spanning five floors in a classic 1913 building that was once the tallest in the city, 360-degree views of Manhattan and a spherical, cylindrical unit stretching 75 feet up into the building’s Gothic spire. It has 125 windows offering views of the city as well as a private elevator going up the 792-foot building.
It is not immediately clear why the penthouse has been sitting without a buyer for so long — whether the initial nine-figure asking price was too exorbitant or the general moving away from penthouse living among the city’s wealthiest residents taking place throughout the last decade. While luxury sales in the city have been picking up steadily amid the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent recovery, this is one penthouse unit that has not had an easy time on the market.
Williams New York (Rendering)
It could also be the unusual spherical design that is making it difficult for buyers to commit such a large sum of money. Horn once revealed that one prospective buyer considered turning it into a one-bedroom bachelor pad while an architect thought of building in cold storage for the fur coats of uber-wealthy guests.
“Even architects couldn’t necessarily conceive of the space,” Horn told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. “We realized this is way too complicated for 80 percent of the people who are going to see it.”
Listing brokers Stan Ponte and Joshua Judge of Sotheby’s International Realty are now overseeing the sale and marketing of the property. The Woolworth Building has 32 condos starting at the 29th floor and 75 percent have already sold, Horn recently told the New York Post.
