Breaking ground at the beginning of the Great Depression, the house got off to what is in hindsight an ominous start. It was built by architect Horace Trumbauer for Herbert N. Straus, the son of Macy’s owners (and Titanic victims, whose death is depicted in the movie) Isidor and Ida Straus. The younger Straus died in 1933 and never lived in it himself; his heirs donated it to the Catholic Church in 1944, when work had still not been completed on it, and it became a hospital. The Birch Wathen School, a private academy that serves kindergarteners through 12th graders, bought the house in 1962, then sold it to Epstein’s mentor Leslie Wexner in 1989 for $13.2 million, which was at the time the highest-ever sale price for a Manhattan townhouse. Despite dumping millions into subsequent renovations, Wexner never really lived in it either, and he and the house were featured in a 1996 New York Times story about rich people who buy homes they never use. Epstein acquired the house in 1998 under somewhat opaque, vaguely suspicious circumstances — it was placed in a trust he controlled jointly with Wexner, and the title was transferred for a price of $0 — and moved in. Strangely, over the course of nearly 90 years, Epstein is the only person who’s ever actually lived there.
I suspect that house was used for the same thing all along.