The Dakota

The Dakota was a bet that the rich would live stacked. In 1880, when Edward Clark — the Singer sewing machine lawyer — commissioned Henry Hardenbergh to build on the empty edge of the Upper West Side, apartment living was for the poor; the city's elite lived in brownstones. The Dakota was the argument that a building could be grand enough to change that: German Renaissance mass, buff brick and Nova Scotia freestone, fourteen-foot ceilings, a courtyard big enough to turn a carriage, and a name chosen because the site was so far uptown it might as well have been the territory. It was fully leased before the roof was on.

The building did what Clark intended — it made the Upper West Side, and it made apartment living acceptable to the class that had refused it. The list of residents is the century's register: Boris Karloff, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Judy Garland, Roberta Flack, Rex Reed, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who bought the apartment in 1973 and made it the center of their lives.

The Dakota's two nights are the file — Rosemary's Baby, filmed in the building in 1968, made it the face of Manhattan dread; and December 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman waited at the archway entrance and shot John Lennon five times as he came home from the studio. The gate is the memorial — the iron arch and the sentry box where the fans still gather, and the Strawberry Fields mosaic across the street in the park the building overlooks.

The Dakota is still a cooperative — the most exclusive address in the city, the building that invented the idea that a New York apartment could be a mansion. The ghosts it keeps are the residents': the building's legend is the people who chose to live inside it, and the one who died at its door.