One of the most impressive and exclusive buildings on Park Avenue, this 12-story building was erected in 1927 and has only 11 apartments. It was designed for Starrett Brothers in Italian Renaissance-style by York & Sawyer, an architectural firm best known for its bank buildings. The luxurious and elegant building has the city’s most spectacular maisonette, a 27-room triplex with its own entrance on the sidestreet that leads up marble stairs into the apartment’s foyer. The maisonette has its own address, 666 Park Avenue.The lower two floors have double-height entertaining rooms, including one that is 46 feet long, 22 feet wide and 18 feet high. The apartment was specifically designed for Ms. William K. Vanderbilt II, the former Virginia ("Birdie" Graham Fair, a daughter of James Graham Fair, a mining magnate who opened the Comstock Lode of silver in Nevada and became a U. S. Senator. Mrs. Vanderbilt subsequently sold her palatial apartment to Seton Porter, a founder of the National Distillers Corporation and husband of Fredericka V. Berwind, a daughter of a coal magnate.In his excellent book, "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," (Atheneum, 1990), James Trager said that Mrs. Porter was "once called the most beautiful woman in Philadelphia," and had been previously married to the head of the Morgan Harjes Bank in Paris and had "organized and endowed the first privately founded military hospital at the front" in World War I. In 1938, according to Salwen, the apartment was...