John Lennon - 1940 - 1980

There are places I remember . . .

Maybe if you're a New Yorker, you grow accustomed to the sight.

Maybe if you live in the city, it becomes just another part of the Manhattan landscape.

But if you're from somewhere else, visiting, and you're not expecting to encounter it. . . .

Well, you sense that you've been in front of this building before, even though you never have. You feel it before you fully see it.

To say the building is spooky is perhaps too easy. Yet everything about it -- the high gables, the balustrades, the gas lanterns burning even in the daytime, the black iron gates leading into the open interior courtyard -- seems purposely designed to give off an aura of portent.

When the 1968 movie "Rosemary's Baby" was filmed, and the exterior of this building -- the Dakota -- was chosen as the site of the eerie tale, the die may have been cast. For anyone who ever saw the movie, the temperature drops a few degrees as soon as those walls come into sight.

Yet it is what happened here 29 years ago this week that draws curious visitors still.


Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon to death next to those courtyard gates on the night of December 8, 1980, as Lennon was returning to his home inside the Dakota. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had spent the evening at a recording studio known as the Record Plant, working on a song called "Walking on Thin Ice." As they neared the entrance to the Dakota just before 11 p.m., Chapman, who that same afternoon, at the same entrance, had asked for and received an autograph from Lennon, waited with a gun.

Lennon never had a chance. He would be pronounced dead at the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. His public life had been somewhat quieter since the breakup of the Beatles; although many of his admirers around the globe were aware that he had become a resident of New York, relatively few knew exactly where in the city he lived.

On the night of the murder, though, as the news of his death quickly spread, so, too, did photographs and live television images of the Dakota. The building on that night became synonymous with heartache, with senseless loss, with joy extinguished..

To anyone in this city, in this country, in this world, who is younger than 32 or 33 years old, the memory of Lennon is of a man who has always been dead. The murder was past tense by the time people who are now that age first became aware of his name.

The Dakota, in its own way, may be, to them, like Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., or the triple underpass in Dallas. A place where something terrible happened, yes, but something terrible that happened in history, not in the recollected narrative of their daily lives.


Twenty-nine Decembers ago, a man on 72nd Street wanted only one thing:

To get home for the night.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jknynk5vny8&feature=PlayList&p=3264633B54...