The Dakota has been one of New York’s best-known buildings for nearly 140 years. A private building, it was one of the first major developments on the Upper West Side and is the city’s oldest luxury apartment building, unsurprisingly an American Historic Landmark. Eternized in the cinema as an address for devil worshipers thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, in real life it was where John Lennon lived his last years of life, being murdered on the sidewalk when he left home.

The fact that it was 50 years since the former Beatle moved there with Yoko Ono, who still lives there, made news this week. Yes, she is the oldest tenant in recent Dakota history. The couple even owned five units in the building. It was her main residence, as well as included a guest house, storage room, and studio for her. Yes. A mini palace.

The Dakota, as it is simply known, rose between 72nd and 73rd Streets on the west side when there was almost nothing around, in the wake of the construction of Central Park itself, which is in front of it. In the 1860s, the occupation of the area around the park with large buildings and houses was stimulated (as we can follow in The Gilded Age), but the geography followed from the west side contributed to slower growth there.

Large buildings with apartments were nothing new, but in general, they were associated with tenements and not with luxury, which went against the idea that it was for workers, but in this case, from the middle and upper classes. The Dakota, with its eight floors, would cost a high price for the time – one million dollars – and would be a residential hotel with up to 50 apartments, each with five to twenty rooms.

The name that is so famous today only appeared in 1882, before the inauguration but still under construction, in what is alleged to have been a reference to the state in the interior of the United States, Dakota, which is isolated and distant as the Upper West Side was at the time, but which was never isolated. This version emerged from the manager of the building in 1933, who said in an interview that “because it was as far west as it was north”. Although it was his design, Edward C. Clark never saw the finished Dakota. He died two years before the opening, leaving the apartment complex to his eldest grandson, Edward Severin Clark, who was 12 at the time.

The doors of the Dakota opened on October 27, 1884, and were almost immediately occupied by lawyers, brokers, and merchants. All rich, no one famous. As you recall, none of them were on The Gilded Age’s 400 list, but as early as 1890 there was a waiting list for vacant apartments in the area. For New York City, the prestige of the Upper West neighborhood owes much to the existence of the Dakota and the American Museum of Natural History, a few blocks from the Dakota. The building also aroused the interest of other buildings nearby, but until the end of the 19th century it was the only residential building in the area, but that was because the lack of electricity prevented elevators, something that only changed after 1896. As proof of its luxury, the Dakota did not have to wait because it had its own power plant.

One of the endearing factors for the Dakota was also the fact that, at least for 50 years, it underwent little change, even as the city grew and modernized. It was only around 1950 that the rooms that were once used by employees and located on the upper floors were converted into apartments. Its proximity to Broadway theaters became an attraction for artists, but the units took a long time to become available, generating a joke that those who entered only came out in the coffin.

Many famous people lived in Dakota, but no one was more associated with the address than John Lennon and Yoko Ono, so much so that today the address is like a memorial to the artist. And a place that lives up to its ‘historic’ status.

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