With 27 rooms over three floors, the maisonette at 660 Park Avenue is one of the most remarkable prewar apartments in all of New York. Designed for a Vanderbilt who never moved in, its monumental rooms were plucked from European manors and have somehow remained more or less unchanged for nearly a century.
For decades, we’ve had to be content with scant photos and a few descriptions hidden in decades-old newspaper articles to piece together what it actually looks like inside. But after its latest owner, Dame Jillian Sackler, widow to Arthur of the Sackler family, passed away at the end of May, it’s possible that the home will switch hands or be listed publicly for the first time in 44 years.