Sometime in 1995 or earlier, exact date unknown, Les Wexner gave Jeffrey Epstein ownership of the 21,000 square feet town house he owns in Manhattan. The gift became public in a January 1996 story from The New York Times.
From The New York Times:
Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art and furnishings. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of last month’s Architectural Digest. When asked how long Mr. Wexner had occupied the property, Jeffrey Epstein, his protege and one of his financial advisers, replied, “Les never spent more than two months there.” Thus the prorated cost of Mr. Wexner’s sejours would appear to have been in excess of a million dollars a day.
Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink. The house also has a heated sidewalk, a luxurious provision that explains why, while snow blankets the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, the Wexner house (and Bill Cosby’s house across the street) remains opulently snow-free, much to the delight of neighborhood dogs.
The seven-story house was built by the society architect Horace Trumbauer in 1933 for Herbert N. Straus, an heir to the Macy’s fortune, who died before it was completed. (Mr. Trumbauer also built Clarendon Court in Newport, R.I., the former home of Sunny and Claus von Bulow.) The Straus house later became a convalescent home and the Birch Wathen School, making Mr. Wexner the first private resident — or at least, the first private nonresident.
Reached in Florida last week, Mr. Epstein said that the house was now his.
