667 Dark Avenue

For the popular fan forum, see 667 Dark Avenue: Answering the Wrong Questions.

“	Listen to us. We sound hopelessly spoiled. We're living in an enormous apartment. We each have our own room. The doorman has promised to watch out for Count Olaf, and at least one of our new guardians is an interesting person. And yet we're standing here complaining.	”
	— Violet Baudelaire to her brother

667 Dark Avenue is the location of a very "in" high rise apartment building in the city where the Baudelaires originally lived.^[1] Dark Avenue is in a highly fashionable district, and as a result, both the building and the street it overlooks are constantly redecorated to suit the times.

The Ersatz Elevator

It is here that the Baudelaires reside over the course of Book the Sixth, The Ersatz Elevator. The building's penthouse apartment is owned by Jerome and Esmé Squalor. Jerome purchased it after receiving a cryptic letter from Jacques Snicket, which urged him to acquire the apartment and never ever sell it. The reason for this entreaty becomes clear when the Baudelaires discover a secret passageway in one of the building's elevator shafts, which connects the penthouse apartment to the plot of land on which the Baudelaire Mansion once stood.^[2]

Locations

The apartment is said to contain either 48 or 84 floors, but the real number is 66.

Ersatz Elevator - The elevator that used to be used for the apartment was taken out by Esmé Squalor, probably so that no one would know about the ersatz elevator doors that are next to the other elevator. It is unknown if the elevator was ever reinstalled following the events of The Ersatz Elevator.
Penthouse Apartment - Home of the Squalors. It has seventy-one bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, breakfast rooms, snack rooms, sitting rooms, standing rooms, ballrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and an assortment of rooms that seemed to have no purpose at all. The penthouse was so enormous that the Baudelaire orphans often found themselves hopelessly lost inside it. Violet would leave her bedroom to go brush her teeth and not find her way back for an hour. Klaus would accidentally leave his glasses on a kitchen counter and waste the whole afternoon trying to find the right kitchen. Sunny would find a very comfortable spot for sitting and biting things and be unable to find it the next day. It was often difficult to spend any time with Jerome, simply because it was very difficult to find him amid all the fancy rooms of their new home, and the Baudelaires scarcely saw Esmé at all.
- Squalor Library - Located next to Klaus' bedroom, it was a large and comfortable room with hundreds of books on its shelves. However, Klaus was disappointed to find that every single book was merely a description of what had been in and out during various times in history. Klaus tried to interest himself in books of this type, but it was so dull to read a snooty book like Boots Were In in 1812 or Trout: In France They're Out that Klaus found himself spending scarcely any time in the library at all.
Floor above the penthouse - As revealed in Snicket's autobiography, a photograph in Chapter 13 seems to confirm that there was an extra floor above the penthouse. Its exact use/purpose is not said, though it's likely to have been a safe place where volunteers could hide once retrieved from the ersatz elevator. It is unknown if Esmé Squalor or Count Olaf knew about the floor, and it's also unknown if Jerome had found out the floor once he became a volunteer and did research for his book Odious Lusting After Finance.
Of course. there is also an ersatz elevator, which Esme pushes them down into.

Trivia

There were 1849 windows in 667 Dark Avenue. 1849 is the year in which Edgar Allan Poe died.
In The Penultimate Peril, the Baudelaires pass the apartment on their way to the Hotel Denouement.
Having 48 or 84 floors is a reference to George Orwell's 1984, which was written in 1948. Also, the average of 48 and 84 is 66, which would equate to the 65 known floors, and the 1 secret floor.
667 Dark Avenue is a number more than 666, the number often associated with evil. In British jokes, 667 is "The Neighbor of the Beast."
- Why Daniel Handler chose to name the street as such is unknown. However, he admitted the books have drawn controversy, especially from fundamentalist Christians, so he may have named it as such to tease them.[1]