Before it became infamous as Jeffrey Epstein's house of horrors, 9 East 71st Street was a gilded mansion with an illustrious past. How he came to own it remains a mystery.
The story below was originally published on July 10, 2019.
The French neoclassical townhouse at 9 East 71st Street is on one of the most fashionable blocks on the Upper East Side. Bookended to the west by the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue and the 1810 St. James’ Church just across Madison Avenue in the east, is not usually the kind of place that FBI agents use a crowbar to access.
But the home is having a moment of infamy, as the $77-million house of horrors where financier Jeffrey Epstein lived and allegedly sexually abused underage girls; lurid photos of girls were discovered in a safe during the FBI raid.
Today, the houses's fifteen-feet-high oak doors, shaded by Callery pear trees on the north side of the street, bear gouges from that crow bar. It is the only visual evidence of the raid that took place this past Saturday, at the same time that Epstein was being arrested at Teterboro, the private jet airport in New Jersey that serves New York City’s ruling class.
In addition to being an alleged crime scene, questions swirl about the circumstances under which Epstein came to own the house. Its previous owner was his mentor, Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of L Brands, which owns retailers including Victoria’s Secret.For reasons that have never been explained, Wexner appears to have made a gift of the house to Epstein, transferring title for the cost of $0 around 1996. The New York Times reports the property was formally transferred in 2011 from a trust controlled by Wexner and Epstein to a Virgin Islands-based entity controlled by Epstein; Wexner, meanwhile, told the Times through a spokeswoman that he "severed ties" with Epstein a decade ago.Number 9 had many incarnations along its path to infamy. Fifty feet wide and seven stories tall, the house was designed by Horace Trumbauer, a fashionable residential architect, for Herbert N. Straus, an heir to the Macy’s department store fortune, whose father had perished on the Titanic 18 years earlier.
(Trumbauer was highly sought-after by the stylish rich—it was onto a Trumbauer bathroom floor in Newport, R.I., that Sunny von Bulow collapsed in 1980, setting off the attempted murder trial of her recently-deceased husband, Claus.)
Construction on the Straus mansion began in 1930, but three years later, Straus was dead himself, felled by a heart attack at 51. He never moved into the 40-room mansion behind the handsome limestone façade. With the death of his client and the onset of the Depression, Trumbauer's masterpiece was boarded up at 90 percent complete, and sat unfinished until 1944.
That year, according to American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, by Michael C. Kathrens, Straus’s sons made a gift of it to the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of New York, which “used it as a 60-bed annex for St. Clare’s hospital for convalescing soldiers returning from the war.”.......MORE
Back in 2012, Daytonian in Manhattan did a first rate post on the property:
The 1933 Herbert Straus Mansion -- No. 9 East 71st StreetIf interested in architectural and/or social history Daytonian is hard to beat. Also on the blogroll at right.
