Streetscapes - The Real 666 Park Avenue THE title building of the new ABC series "666 Park Avenue" is a fiction; the network is using shots of the Ansonia as a backdrop. But although few New Yorkers have heard of it, 666 Park Avenue does exist. It is one of the city's most remarkable maisonettes, a subnumbering of 660 Park Avenue at 67th Street, built in 1927 for an owner who never occupied it. In early 1926 Frederick Ecker, a vice president of Metropolitan Life Insurance and later its president, hired York & Sawyer to file plans for a sumptuous co-op building on the sunny side of Lenox Hill, soon called 660 Park Avenue. Most other apartment houses on Park were speculative ventures, but Mr. Ecker was building for himself and at least one friend, Darwin Kingsley, head of New York Life. York & Sawyer was by this time a safe, sober firm of bank architects, and it designed a very safe, very sober all-limestone building of the most discreet kind. Indeed, take away a few details and 660 would be a blank modern box of the type now so reviled. There was one difference: a sweep of larger windows on the second floor. This was the principal floor of a three-story maisonette purchased by Virginia Vanderbilt for $195,000 in early 1926, before the building was complete. She must have supervised the planning of the 27-room apartment. The New York Times reported that the main salon was to be 22 feet by 46, with a library 18 feet by 23, and that all would have ceilings 18 feet high. As it happens, Mrs. Vanderbilt was deserting her house at 666 Fifth Avenue, which she sold for $1.5 million, and it may have been she who selected a separate number for the maisonette - 666 Park Avenue. Mrs. Vanderbilt and her husband, William K. Vanderbilt Jr., had been living apart since 1909, and her choice of location was peculiar, because Mr. Vanderbilt had since 1923 owned a maisonette apartment across the street at 655 Park Avenue. In any event, she had a change of heart and sold the maisonette in September 1927, a few months after filing for divorce. The buyer was Seton Porter, an engineer who had done very well in the liquor industry. Head of National Distillers, he was also chairman of the American Sumatra Tobacco Company, and a director of the General Precision Equipment Corporation, Republic Aviation and 20th Century-Fox. It was apparently Mr. Porter and his wife, Marie, who finished and decorated the maisonette. The couple installed at least four antique rooms: a dining room from a house in London, a pine room from Spettisbury Manor in England for the main salon, and two rooms from the Château de Courcelles in France. In 1931 International Studio magazine said the vintage interiors "remain happily undisturbed by the insolence of the Chrysler Tower" and other symbols of the modern age. In the 1930 census, most shareholders of 660 Park Avenue gave the value of their apartments as $100,000; the Porters assessed theirs at $300,000. Besides Messrs. Ecker and Kingsley, early residents of 660 included William T. Dewart, the publisher of The Sun; Francis Weld, a founder of the investment banking firm White, Weld; and Albert H. Wiggin, the chairman of Chase National Bank. As for Mrs. Vanderbilt, she built the French neo-Classical house at 60 East 93rd Street now owned by the antiques dealer Carlton Hobbs. In 1939, the maisonette became the home of Edward M. Stout, a woolens manufacturer, and his wife, Agnes. Mrs. Stout had her own real estate firm, and in 1930 had described to The Sun an English client who rejected "our modern, towering apartment structures, with their brass buttoned flunkeys." She found him an apartment with a terrace in an old Murray Hill brownstone. The Stouts sold 666 Park Avenue to Evander Schley, who owned, among many other concerns, the Chihuahua Mining Company. Mr. Schley and his wife, Sophie, had an active entertainment schedule. The magazine feature "Life Goes to a Party" went to the maisonette in 1947 and encountered Lana Turner, the Duchess of Windsor and Samuel Goldwyn, among others. The Schleys" son, also Evander Schley, recalled in an interview that as a child, "I was supposed to kiss the queen of Yugoslavia's hand, and I bolted and hid under a table." Mrs. Schley died in 1950, her husband in 1952, and at the age of 11, their son was sent to live with his governess at 610 Park Avenue, two blocks south. The Schleys" estate sold the maisonette to Fan Fox and Leslie Samuels, the philanthropists who donated much to Lincoln Center. In the 1980s Arthur M. Sackler, the medical publisher and art collector, lived there. His widow, Jillian, now occupies 666 Park Avenue. The younger Mr. Schley was not spoiled by his childhood in one of New York's most magnificent apartments. After service in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964, he returned to New York and found a rent-controlled penthouse in the village for $299 per month. "I was very, very lucky," he says - about the place in the Village.