Bobby Cayre and Edmond M. Safra are teaming up to buy the landmark Scribner Building after it went back to the lender in a foreclosure sale.
Cayre’s Aurora Capital Associates and Safra’s AVRS Partners are in contract to buy the 69,000-square-foot building at 597 Fifth Avenue, The Real Deal has learned. The contract price was not known, but the sale of the Midtown office and retail property is expected to close in March, per servicer commentary on Morningstar.
Club Monaco occupies the entire retail portion of the 13-story property, but the office portion is fully vacant, according to marketing materials. A JLL team including Andrew Scandalios, David Giancola and Drew Isaacson brokered the deal.
Cayre and JLL declined to comment. AVRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lender took over the building and the adjacent 3 East 48th Street in a June foreclosure auction after Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities defaulted on the CMBS loan. The most recent appraisal, from March 2025, valued the two-building property at $61 million, per Morningstar. (The smaller building is not part of the deal.)
That’s a steep drop from the $108.5 million Joe Sitt paid for the Scribner and its six-story neighbor in 2011. Sitt combined the parcels to create a large Fifth Avenue retail footprint in a bet on sky-high rents. UBS originated the $105 million mortgage in 2014, when the property was valued at $180 million.
Thor defaulted on the loan in 2020, and a trustee for the CMBS bondholders sued Thor in 2023, claiming the landlord refused to put money into the buildings. Unpaid interest and fees swelled the buildings’ total debt to $151 million by the time of the foreclosure sale, according to court documents.
The building carries a storied pedigree. It once served as the headquarters of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publishing house behind literary heavyweights such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut. In the decades since Scribner decamped, the address has hosted a more eclectic roster, including Anthony Weiner’s ill-fated mayoral campaign and the scandal-scarred data firm Cambridge Analytica.
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Thor Equities’ 597 Fifth Ave value cut in half
Lender accuses Thor of abandoning historic Scribner Building
Thor delinquent on $105M loan at 597 Fifth
