You Better Sit Down. The Big Chair's Gone.

The attraction, he said, was an immediate hit with customers, who came from miles away to see it atop a specially made stand that was adorned with a dedication plaque that proclaimed it "The World's Largest Chair."

A year later, Curtis said, he came up with another idea to draw attention: Someone would live on it.

A glass company constructed a 10-by-10-foot cubicle, furnished with a bed, shower, toilet, heater, air conditioner and balcony. It was placed atop the seat.

All the Curtises needed was a tenant, whom they found one afternoon when a 19-year-old woman -- the Washington Junior Chamber of Commerce's "Miss Get Out the Vote 1960" -- walked into their store to buy furniture.

Rebecca Kirby, then a model known as Lynn Arnold, said she was approached by a store manager who asked if she wanted to earn money living atop the chair. "I thought the guy was nuts," Kirby, 64, said by phone from her home 75 miles south of Savannah, Ga.

Despite objections from her husband, Raymond, Kirby said, she agreed to take the job, mostly because she needed money for an operation to remove ovarian cysts. "I didn't want to do anything like stand up there naked or in a bathing suit," she said. "They wanted a Cinderella figure; they didn't want Marilyn Monroe. I figured I could pull this off without being branded a slut."

On Aug. 13, 1960, after Curtis Bros. sent her on a $300 shopping spree for clothes, she said, a forklift raised her to her new home, where her meals were delivered every day and where she watched TV, read books and talked on the telephone. Every few hours, she would slip out onto the balcony to wave to crowds drawn by newspaper and radio ads that invited them to see "Alice in 'Looking Glass House' " and guess how long she could remain up there.

For six weeks, Kirby said, she had no regular visitors except for her 14-month-old son, Richard, who was placed in a dumbwaiter for the ride up to his mother. Then, she said, with her earnings approaching $1,500, and her growing tired of life above, she decided to return to earth.

She took a cab home, she recalled, because her husband (they divorced later) refused to pick her up. "I spent the next 20 years trying to live it down," she said, laughing and adding that her life remained largely unchanged except that she was able to pay for her operation.

Kirby eventually moved away, but the big chair remained in place, surviving the 1968 riots, the demise of the Curtis furniture business in the 1970s, and the neighborhood's decline.

The Curtises went into the real estate business but remained at the address, where they converted their property into offices that are the headquarters of the D.C. Lottery. They continued to maintain the big chair, which for a time became home to an oversize Santa Claus and lights at Christmas.

Over the years, the cycles of rain and snow frayed the chair, and the Curtises took to patching holes with cement. Then it was painted in brown automobile paint that could withstand the seasonal changes. Metal braces and fiberglass were added.