Great and interesting little article/blog post from the NYTimes a few weeks ago (May 27, 2011) about 18 East 68th St… surprisingly/shockingly absent was the most interesting story, the biggest deal, the end of the dealing (bad gambling pun) to occur at 18 East 68th St: “Ermine Wrapped Patron Caught in Gambling Den”!!!

A brief excerpt:

“Storied Sloane Mansion on the Auction Block”
Word of a scandal began to fly through New York society circles in 1898 when Henry T. Sloane, a wealthy carpet manufacturer who was furnishing the new mansions, hotels and clubs of the city, deeded a mansion on the Upper East Side to his wife…
It was soon confirmed that Mr. Sloane’s wife, Jessie, had taken up with another man, and she married him a mere five hours after divorcing Mr. Sloane. So Mr. Sloane set out to build himself a new mansion at 18 East 68th Street, off Fifth Avenue…
After word of the Sloanes’ separation had spread — The New York Times reported in December 1898 that “because of their prominence in society, the gossip started and surmises were rife on every side” — Mr. Sloane commissioned the architect C. P. H. Gilbert to design a six-story, 18,267-square-foot Beaux-Arts house. With 17-foot-high ceilings in some rooms, an elephantine marble staircase and seven granite fireplaces, the building was completed around 1905…
Mr. Sloane moved in with his two young daughters, preventing his former wife from writing to them or even speaking to them on the street until the children were 21, or she could prove she “had led a moral life,” whichever came first, according to an account in The New York Tribune…
The investors bought out the tenants who remained in the building in 2007, and Mr. Sloane’s house, seeming a little ghostly with all the empty rooms, has been vacant ever since.”

NYTimes Author: Sarah Kersaw
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/big-deal-storied-sloane-mansion-on-the-auction-block/

A Weegee Museum wouldn’t be the worst idea..

PM Daily, Dec. 23, 1940

CG, 18 East 68th St., N.Y., N.Y., 01/2010

Ggogle Street View of Ermine Wrapped Mansion… 01/2010