By C.J. Hughes

A loss for David Berley—one of several in recent months for the embattled former WeWork landlord—could be a win for fans of a bagel and a schmear.

The chairman of the company Walter & Samuels has sold the mixed-use site 5 E. 47th St. to Victor Mejia, a founder of fast-growing chain Liberty Bagels, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Monday.

The sale price in the deal, which went into contract April 30 and closed Oct. 23, was $9.4 million, based on the deed.

A 7-story, 17,500-square-foot site, a Class B building from 1920 that offers office spaces atop a ground-floor retail berth near Fifth Avenue, No. 5 has been marketed for about a year and was delivered vacant, said David Schectman, the Meridian Capital Group broker who helmed its sales team.

A veteran investor who once controlled dozens of older, side-street office buildings in Midtown, the Flatiron District and Chelsea, Berley has been selling rather than buying ever since WeWork filed for bankruptcy in 2023. As part of the co-working provider’s reorganization, a judge allowed WeWork to tear up most of its existing leases in a major blow to landlords.

The same year his firm offloaded a troubled parking garage on East Ninth Street in the East Village that a developer later bulldozed and made into luxury housing. And, earlier this year Walter & Samuels sold five mixed-use and retail structures on Sixth Avenue, between Waverly Place and Greenwich Avenue, for a combined $24.3 million.

Schectman is also currently marketing Berley’s 242 W. 27th St., a 7-story mixed-use building in Chelsea that’s also completely empty.

If Berley is looking to maximize his cash-raising, he might be coming away a bit disappointed: In the case of 5 E. 47th, for instance, he took a nearly 50% loss on the building, for which he paid $18.3 million in 2015, the register shows. Since Covid, the market for small, prewar and no-frills office buildings has deteriorated.

How Mejia will use the site, which is zoned for residential development and which comes with 16,100 square feet of unused air rights, is unclear. A phone message left for him at Liberty’s store on West 35th Street was not returned by press time.

But the name of the shell company he used for the transaction, Liberty Grand Central Realty, suggests a bagelry could be in the offing for the building’s 3,000-square-foot retail space. And Liberty, which operates as a franchise, does not appear to currently offer any stores in the immediate area.
Walter & Samuels’ sites that WeWork once leased include 315 W. 36th St., 410 Park Ave. S. and 130 Madison Ave. WeWork also once occupied two of the 10 floors at Berley’s 225 W. 39th St., a Garment District building that he unloaded in 2024 for $22 million after decades of ownership.

The acquisition also comes amid an expansionary moment for Liberty, which Mejia and Alex Vithoulkas co-founded in 1995, and a boom for the bagel industry in general.
The partners and other investors are in contract to purchase a former synagogue at 1025 Sixth Ave. in the Garment District for $3.1 million, court filings show. In June Manhattan state Supreme Court approved the sale, a stamp of approval required because of the synagogue’s nonprofit status, though the deal has not yet closed, public records indicate.

Efforts to reach Walter & Samuels executives by press time were unsuccessful.