Joe Sitt and Melissa Gliatta

In 1995, Melissa Gliatta was an executive with The Limited when Joe Sitt recruited her to join Thor Equities and help operate its 18 Ashley Stewart retail stores in urban neighborhoods.

Three decades later, The Limited is defunct, Ashley Stewart changed hands and filed for Chapter 11, and Thor Equities is in a very different line of business. First it bought struggling malls, fixed them up, and sold them. Then it moved back into retail — but this time purchased the properties.

“We pivoted from malls to buying on Fifth Avenue or Market Street in San Francisco, or Bond Street,” Gliatta said. “We went from being the tenant to being a landlord, and we haven’t looked back.”

Thor Equities’ portfolio these days includes industrial developments in New Jersey and Long Island, hotels and resorts in Mexico, revamped commercial corridors in Chicago, and destination retail stores in Manhattan and Coney Island. 

The company’s been actively buying and selling properties in New York too. Last summer, it acquired the Chocolate Factory Lofts at 275 Park Avenue in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill for $58.5 million. Then in December it sold an industrial warehouse in the borough’s Red Hook neighborhood to Amazon for  $157 million. But Thor’s most significant project in the New York region could end up being its bid to transform a 5-acre Coney Island lot into a $3 billion casino, a 500-room hotel, and a 92,000-square-foot convention center. 

Gliatta has been preparing for months to file the extensive casino application with the state, which could award as many as three state licenses among a dozen applicants by the end of the year. “Quite frankly, it’s all I’m focused on,” she said. “It’s an enormously complicated [application], one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and we have an entire team devoted to creating it.”

She believes that Coney Island would be a good site for a gaming resort because the neighborhood has been a destination for summertime entertainment for generations. 

“People in this neighborhood want jobs, and the seasonality of Coney Island makes it difficult to create year-round jobs,” she said. “The casino itself is a great driver, but we’re looking to revitalize the area with restaurants, a theater and a hotel too.”