Woolworth Mansion Hits Rental Market Asking $125K A Month

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The owners of a famed Upper East Side townhouse are searching for a tenant.

The home known as Woolworth Mansion at 4 East 80th Street is being offered as a rental, asking $125,000 per month, according to a listing on StreetEasy. The listing, which includes the furniture, comes as the owners — the family of the late fitness magnate, Lucille Roberts — have yet to find a buyer for the five-story property, which has been up for sale since the fall.

The mansion, built in 1915 for the daughter of “Five-and-Dime” store mogul Frank Woolworth, hit the market in November for $59 million, though its asking price dropped to just under $50 million in March.

The Roberts first sought to offload the home in 2011, when they listed it for $90 million. The family pulled it off the market two years later without a deal and rented it in 2021 for $80,000 a month.

Roberts and her husband, commercial real estate investor Bob Roberts, renovated the 20,000-square-foot home after purchasing it for $6 million in 1995. Roberts, who founded a chain of all-women gyms, died in 2003.

The 35-foot-wide townhouse has nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms and features a solarium, wood-paneled library, an elevator and rooftop lounge.

The Modlin Group’s Adam Modlin has both the rental and sale listing.

The property joins other Upper East Side mansions also on the hunt for renters, including a Gilded Age mansion at 4 East 64th Street asking $175,000 a month. The Lenox Hill property hit the market in April with a monthly asking rent of $150,000.

In Carnegie Hill, a 16,000-square-foot mansion owned by former Lehman Brothers executive Robert Millard is on the market asking $85,000 a month. The home at 9 East 88th Street has been on the market for sale since 2021, asking $38 million.

Demand for luxury rentals rose at the start of the year, as economic uncertainty sparked by President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and persistently high interest rates kept some would-be buyers on the sidelines. Between January and April, 300 apartments asking more than $20,000 a month were rented, a 30 percent uptick compared to the same period last year, according to data from UrbanDigs.