The Dakota, NYC Home of John Lennon and Yoko Ono

The Dakota is a co-op apartment building located in New York City along Central Park West at W 72 Street across from Central Park. This building is was constructed in the 1880s and at the time, was constructed in a sparsely populated area of New York City that was much further from where the center of the city was considered (near Wall St in lower Manhattan). Today, this building is on some of the most valuable real estate in New York City. The Dakota is square and has a central courtyard in the center. All of the exterior windows that face the street are windows for bedrooms and large family rooms while the windows that face the inner courtyard are for the kitchens and other rooms in the house.

While the Dakota is widely loved by historians and architecture aficionados, it is most famous for being the former home of The Beatles legend John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono as well as being the location of John Lennon’s murder as he returned home with his wife on the night of December 8, 1980. Lennon was shot in the arch entrance (photo below) by Mark David Chapman, who was arrested shortly after. As of 2012, Yoko Ono still owns apartments in The Dakota.

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The Dakota in New York City by Joey B. Lax-Salinas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.joeyblsphotography.com.