667 Dark Avenue

667 Dark Avenue is a fictional apartment building in "The City" where many books in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events take place. In The Ersatz Elevator, the Baudelaire orphans stay at the building's penthouse apartment, home of their guardians Esmé and Jerome Squalor.

667 Dark Avenue has 66 floors, with one apartment on each floor. There is one set of elevator doors on every floor, except on the 66th floor, where there is a second set. Despite this, elevator use is not said to be in style (or just "in"), and everyone uses the stairs instead. This reflects the obsession with current trends that permeates the building. When nautical theming comes into fashion, the entire lobby was redecorated to reflect this.

Esmé Squalor may be the perpetrator of some of these trends, considering that elevator disuse helps to hide the use of the second set of elevator doors on the top floor. That hide a shaft and underground passageway that leading to the former site of the Baudelaire Mansion, which burned down in The Bad Beginning. Another side effect of elevator disuse is that, due to flawed acoustic design, conversations from inside the apartments can easily be overheard from the stairwell. It should also be noted that a hidden floor above the penthouse can be accessed through the extra pair of doors on the penthouse as revealed in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography

Penthouse

The apartment on the top floor boasts many kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, breakfast rooms, snack rooms, sitting rooms, standing rooms, halls, ballrooms, bathrooms, and even rooms that seem to serve no purpose at all. Its assets also include 71 bedrooms, 849 windows, and 612 clocks. There is also one large library, which consists of the catalogs for all of the "In Auctions" and other fashion-conscious books like Boots Were In in 1812. There are so many rooms in the penthouse that one might leave one's bedroom to brush one's teeth and not find one's way back for an hour.

According to Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, there is another floor above the penthouse, but it is never explained how any one would be able to access it, leaving readers to speculate that there may once have been a genuine elevator in the ersatz elevator shaft, allowing for an easier journey from the secret passage to the secret floor. It is neither mentioned further or elsewhere.

The Passageway

There is a passageway to the Baudelaire mansion from 667 Dark avenue. However, Snicket never answers why the passageway was there and what is was for

Notes

• The building's address 667 is similar to 666, the Number of the Beast, and, at at the beginning of the novel, it is literal dark avenue, with all the light blocked out by large trees. Later in the novel, light becomes fashionable again and the trees are chopped down.
• One character states that he can never remember whether there are 48 floors or 84 (the actual number, 66, is the average of these two numbers) - this is a reference to Orwell's 1984, which was written in 1948.
• The number 667 returns later in the series, being a pivotal page of the metafictional A Series of Unfortunate Events.
• The Last two digits - like the digits in the number of Violet's Hospital room - add up to the number 13, a pivotal number throughout the series.
• There is a secret floor above the penthouse as revealed in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography

See also

• List of locations in A Series of Unfortunate Events

pt:Avenida Sombria 667