The Dakota

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Image:Dakota.jpg Image:The Dakota 1880s.jpg Image:Dakotabuilding.jpg The Dakota, built from 1880 to 1884, is an apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City. It was designed by architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who also designed the Plaza Hotel, for Edward Severin Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

The building is said to have been named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. High above the 72nd Street entrance, the figure of a Dakota Indian keeps watch.

The building's high gables and deep roofs with a profusion of dormers, terracotta spandrels and panels, niches, balconies and balustrades give it a North German Renaissance character, an echo of a Hanseatic townhall. Nevertheless its layout and floor plan betray a strong influence of French architectural trends in housing design that had become known in New York in the 1870s.

The Dakota is built in a U-shape around a central courtyard, accessible through the arched passage of the main entrance, a porte cochère large enough that horse-drawn carriages could pass through, letting their passengers disembark sheltered from the weather, then exit on 72nd Street. The general layout of the apartments is also in the French style of the period, with all major rooms not only accessible by a hall or corridor, but also being connected to each other en filade, an arrangement that allowed a natural migration from one room to another, especially on festive occasions. The principal rooms such as parlors or the master bedroom face the street, while the dining room, the kitchen, and other auxiliary rooms are oriented on the courtyard. Apartments are thus aired from two sides, which was a relative novelty in New York at the time. (In the Stuyvesant building, which was built in 1869, a mere ten years earlier, and which is considered New York's first apartment building in the French style, many apartments have windows to one side only.) Some of the drawing rooms were 49 ft. (about 15 m) long, and many of the ceilings are 14 feet high (more than 4 m); the floors are inlaid with mahogany, oak, and cherry (although the apartment of Clark, the building's founder, was famously inlaid with sterling silver).

Originally, the Dakota had 65 apartments with four to twenty rooms, no two alike. These apartments are accessed by staircases and elevators placed in the two corners of the courtyard. Separate service stairs and elevators serving the kitchens are located in mid-block. Built to cater for the well-to-do, the Dakota featured many amenities and a modern infrastructure that was exceptional for the time. The building has a large dining hall; meals could also be sent up to the apartments by dumbwaiters. Electricity was generated by an in-house power plant, and the building has central heating. Besides servants' quarters, there was a playroom and a gymnasium for the children of the tenants under the roof. (In later years, these spaces on the tenth floor were—out of economical reasons—converted into apartments, too.) The lot of the Dakota also comprised a garden and private croquet lawns and a tennis court behind the building between 72nd and 73rd Streets. The stables for the tenant's horses and carriages were located on Columbus Avenue in a building that survives as a garage.

The Dakota was a huge social success from the very start (all apartments were rented before the building opened), but a long-term drain on the fortune of Clark (who died before it was completed) and his heirs. For the high society of New York, it became fashionable to live in such a building, or to rent at least an apartment as a secondary city residence, and the Dakota's success prompted the construction of many other luxury apartment buildings in New York City.

Today, the building is best known as the home of former Beatle John Winston ( later Ono ) Lennon starting in 1973, and as the site of his murder on December 8 1980. As of 2005, Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, still has an apartment in the building. The Strawberry Fields Memorial was laid out in memory of Lennon in Central Park right across Central Park West.

Director Roman Polanski filmed much of Rosemary's Baby in the Dakota, and the building plays a crucial role in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again. Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, a fictional character appearing in many novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, has an apartment at the Dakota. The protagonist in Cameron Crowe's 2001 movie Vanilla Sky is a Dakota resident.

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Celebrity residents

Celebrity residents of the Dakota building have included:

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External links

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Literature

nl:Dakota gebouw no:Dakota-bygningen

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