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In the spring of 2018, Jeffrey Epstein got an email from his neighbor at the time, Howard Lutnick, then the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. “Are you aware as to them building to block our park views,” Lutnick wrote as Annabelle Selldorf’s now-widely-praised designs for the Frick were going before the Landmarks Preservation Commission. “What should we do about it? Time is of the essence.” Epstein replied via his assistant within a day in his typical, busier-than-God style: “no i was not.”
Epstein’s infamous mansion at 9 East 71st Street faced the Frick’s six-story research library and had unimpeded views to the west, over the Frick-family mansion toward Central Park. At No. 11, Lutnick had only a sliver of Epstein’s views — and apparently feared losing them. Within a week of his first message to Epstein, the now–Commerce secretary was pressing his neighbor to draft a letter to the Landmarks Preservation Commission:
You should put in a letter. I’m sending a lawyer. Don’t ignore this. They will build exactly across from you 1. A bus and group entrance, 2. a loading dock for party rentals (used almost every weekend), 3 a massive building to block your sunlight and views. They are trying to jam it through, it matters that we fight. My real estate lawyer is attending and will vehemently object.
Epstein may have been concerned over those blocked views and the hoi polloi of a group entrance, but he doesn’t mention any of that in letters he drafted to the LPC, which were first reported by Artnet. In one draft, Epstein writes that Selldorf’s plans are “not at all consistent with the scale, style, character and historical integrity” of the old Frick buildings and criticizes the addition of an “auditorium” and a “kitchen and café” that may bring “increased noise, congestion and nuisance.” Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, had separately shared news of the plans on May 11, but a second Epstein draft to the LPC, dated May 28, claims, “Only this past weekend was I informed of the details of plans.”
This is all, of course, straight from the classic NIMBY playbook. And there may have never been a group of more powerful NIMBYs in such a condensed span of real estate. That group included Epstein and Lutnick, but also Teri Friedman and Babak Yaghmaie, who were the ones prodding neighbors along 71st to write letters of objection to the LPC in the first place (which is why they ended up in a DoJ file). Then there was Epstein’s friend, the financier Leon Black. “Not sure if this will affect views from the townhouse Leon is looking at,” Kahn wrote to Epstein, in June 2014, about news of the Frick’s last round of plans. Black’s assistant, Melanie Spinella, worried in an email to Epstein that “the street will be quite a mess for a long time.”
The 2014 plans ultimately fell apart, and Lutnick continued to push for the 2018 plans to go the same way. A suit he was allegedly part of claimed a conflict of interest and asked a judge to annul any approvals of the plans, since the museum had hired the same law firm to represent it before planning boards as the mayor had used for a personal matter. (It was ultimately denied.) Frick attorney Jeffrey Braun told the New York Post that the “baloney” suit had been personally funded by Lutnick because he was “concerned about the effect it’s going to have on his views, period.”
The emails appear to prove Braun right. Frick employees may feel a similar dose of vindication. “It just gives you a certain idea of the people we were up against: a very self-entitled, well-connected group of New Yorkers,” a former member of the museum staff tells me. “It was a horrible experience.”
It seems as though Epstein may have never mailed in his letters. A press secretary for the Landmarks Preservation Commission says the agency didn’t find anything from Epstein in the other public letters shared with the commissioners who evaluated the Frick’s applications in 2018. But the letters still show that Epstein cared about his view. And possibly the Frick’s view: Another email, sent in 2009 from a redacted address to Epstein’s handyman, asks for curtains to be installed on the terrace facing the Frick as well as an errand. “You should go over to the Frick museum and just ask them about the cameras they installed looking into JE’s house.”
