The Dakota

Where it sits. The Dakota occupies the whole western side of Central Park West between 72nd and 73rd Streets, facing the park across the avenue. It is the anchor of a row of pre-war apartment houses — the Majestic, the San Remo, the Beresford — that give the Upper West Side its skyline, and it is the oldest of them by decades. Strawberry Fields, the memorial garden with the Imagine mosaic donated by the city of Naples, lies directly opposite inside the park.

The story behind it. Edward Cabot Clark, who ran the Singer sewing machine company, announced an apartment complex on this corner in 1879, when almost all development in Manhattan lay south of 23rd Street and the Upper West Side was scrub and shacks. He told the West Side Association that few men were princely enough to want a whole palace, but many would take a portion of a great building. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed it, work began in late October 1880, and the building was finished in October 1884 — by which time Clark had been dead two years. The name was fixed by mid-1882. The often-repeated story that it was called the Dakota because it stood as remote as Dakota Territory first appears on the record in 1933 and is not supported by contemporary sources; Clark's documented enthusiasm for western place names is the likelier explanation. What is certain is that sceptics called the project Clark's Folly, and that it was fully let on completion.

The architecture. Nine storeys, 185 feet tall, in a German Renaissance manner of brick with sandstone trim and terracotta panels, crowned with steep roofs, dormers, gables and iron cresting. Because the ceilings are so high, its 185 feet is equivalent to a modern fifteen-storey building. The plan is a square wrapped around an H-shaped central courtyard, entered through a double-height archway on 72nd Street, sixteen feet wide and twenty feet tall, built as a porte-cochère so carriages could drive in and set down under cover; portraits above the doorway are thought to show Isaac Singer and his wife. A recessed dry moat runs around the base behind a cast-iron fence, admitting light to the basement and now containing an entrance to the 72nd Street subway station. Four passenger elevators and four service elevators divide the building into quadrants; a separate service drive descends to a lower courtyard so that deliveries and staff never crossed the residents' path. No two of the original apartments were alike, ranging from four rooms to twenty; Clark's own on the sixth floor had eighteen rooms and seventeen fireplaces. An artesian well 365 feet deep was sunk to supply the building. Residents bought it from the Clark family in 1961 and turned it into a cooperative.

On screen. Roman Polanski filmed Rosemary's Baby (1968) here, calling the building the Bramford. What is on location is the outside: the opening crane shot drifting over the roofline and down to the entrance, the arrival at the archway, the courtyard. Every interior — the apartment, the corridors, the neighbours' rooms — was built on a Paramount soundstage in Hollywood, so the layout audiences remember does not exist behind these windows. The film did more than anything else to give the building its reputation; the Chicago Tribune later observed that most Americans met the Dakota's grim presence through it. Bradley Cooper's Maestro (2023) returns to it because Leonard Bernstein lived here, and Jack Finney's 1970 time-travel novel Time and Again uses it as the hinge between centuries.

The other reason people come. John Lennon was shot at the 72nd Street entrance on the evening of 8 December 1980. Yoko Ono has continued to live in the building. The archway is consequently a place of quiet pilgrimage, and the anniversary each December draws crowds to Strawberry Fields across the avenue. Past residents have included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Boris Karloff, Rudolf Nureyev and Roberta Flack; the co-operative board's severity in rejecting applicants is a long-running feature of New York gossip.

Getting there and etiquette. The B and C trains stop at 72nd Street, with an entrance inside the building's own areaway. This is a private home, not an attraction: there is no lobby to enter, a guard sits inside the archway, and residents come and go past the same spot where visitors stand. Photograph the façade from the pavement or from across the avenue, keep the entrance clear, and cross into the park afterwards. The American Museum of Natural History is six blocks north, and Bethesda Terrace fifteen minutes east through the park.