Lights Dim on the Friars Club as Landmark Home is Sold in Foreclosure

For decades, New York’s Friars Club, the seat of American comedy and legendary roasts, has made its home in a landmark building on Manhattan’s East Side. That era appeared to end on Tuesday, not with a punchline and a rimshot, but with a foreclosure auction in which the club’s townhouse was sold to a creditor for $17.2 million.

“Going once, going twice,” the auctioneer called out on Tuesday outside Federal District Court in Manhattan, where a dozen or so people had gathered to find out the club’s fate. There were no other bidders.

With the smack of the auctioneer’s hand on his legal pad — there was no gavel — the sale passed ownership of the Friars Club’s six-story townhouse on East 55th Street to a California loan company.

The auction capped the yearslong decline of the storied comedy institution that had been a main haunt for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle. Hobbled by a flood and the pandemic, the club started missing payments on its $13 million mortgage last year, and the loan company moved to foreclose.

There were times when the institution’s leadership was hopeful that someone would step in to buy the building and revive the comedy institution, but nothing panned out ahead of the auction.

Arthur Aidala, the club’s last dean before it closed, who has tried to lift it out of crisis in recent years, said he continues to be hopeful that some plan will come together that could work to keep the Friars Club at the Friars Club.