On the afternoon of Friday, December 17th, 1960, Ernest A. Gross was sitting in his Wall Street office when the telephone rang. The caller was William Zeckendorf, the undisputed czar of New York real estate. “I want to introduce myself,” Zeckendorf said.

“I’m your new landlord. ”

Gross was one of the Dakota’s most distinguished residents, an international lawyer who had served three times as a delegate to the United Nations. He understood immediately what those words implied. Whenever the developer acquired an old building on a choice piece of land, he razed it and erected a tower of steel and glass in its place.

“Buildings like the Dakota don’t make sense in New York anymore,” Zeckendorf told him. It had been barely three months since Steven Clark’s death. The Clark Foundation, which had inherited the property, had moved quickly to divest itself of the unprofitable building. Zeckendorf claimed to have made an offer of $4.

5 million that afternoon, with a deadline of noon on Monday. The foundation had indicated willingness to accept. The Dakota’s residents had two and a half days over a weekend to find some way to save their home. Gross immediately contacted his neighbor, Charles Douglas Jackson.

“CD” Jackson was a vice president of Time Incorporated, but his background ran deeper than magazine publishing. During the Second World War, he had served as deputy chief of the psychological warfare division for the Allied forces; later, he had worked as a special assistant to President Eisenhower. If anyone knew how to mobilize resources under pressure, it was CD Jackson. The two men hastily called a meeting of the Dakota’s tenants.

As the gathering convened in the old dining room, what unfolded was pandemonium. Elderly residents who had lived in the building for half a century confronted the prospect of eviction. The marble floors echoed with shouting, cursing, stamping, and sobbing. Judy Holliday was there—the actress who had won an Academy Award for *Born Yesterday*—and she sat weeping.

Recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, she wanted only to die in the building she considered home. Miss E. Bruce Lee appeared in a picture hat and trailing gown. She had not set foot outside her eighteen-room apartment in years; some said she was 102.

“I will not be put out of my house,” she kept shouting. “I will not be put out. ”

The meeting dissolved into chaos. Gross and Jackson retreated to the Jackson apartment for drinks, wondering whether the Dakota could be saved at all.

—

The fortune that built the Dakota and brought so many people to love it came from one of the most scandalous men in nineteenth-century America. Isaac Merritt Singer was tall, handsome, and utterly without conscience. He maintained four separate families simultaneously in Manhattan, each unaware of the others. He fathered at least twenty-four children with five different women, and he happened to revolutionize the sewing machine industry along the way.

Singer was born in 1811 in upstate New York. He left home at twelve years old with almost no education and a burning desire to become a famous actor. For nearly two decades he wandered the country with traveling theater troupes. The performances rarely paid well, but Singer discovered he had other talents.

He was charming, persuasive, and gifted at mechanical invention. By 1850, Singer was working in a Boston machine shop when his employer asked him to repair a sewing machine. Singer studied the device and realized he could build something better. Within eleven days—reportedly working eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch—he constructed a prototype that would change the world.

His machine could sew continuously on any part of a garment. It could handle curves, not just straight lines. A skilled operator could produce nine hundred stitches per minute. Nothing like it had ever existed.

Singer secured a patent in August of 1851, and a new industry was born. But Singer was not a businessman. He needed a partner who understood money, contracts, and commerce. He found that partner in Edward Clark—everything Singer was not.

Born the same year as Singer, Clark had trained as a lawyer and built a respectable practice in upstate New York. He was careful, conservative, and devoted to order. He married once, to Caroline Jordan, and remained faithful to her until her death. Where Singer created chaos, Clark created structure.

The two men formed I. M. Singer and Company in 1851. Their partnership was contentious from the start; they disagreed on nearly everything, but they needed each other.

It was Clark who created America’s first installment payment plan. Sewing machines cost over one hundred dollars at a time when the average family earned perhaps five hundred dollars per year. Clark allowed customers to pay a small amount each month until the machine was theirs. Sales exploded.

While Clark built the business, Singer built families. His legal wife, Catherine Maria Haley, had borne him two children before he abandoned her. He then established a household with Mary Ann Sponsler, who believed herself to be his wife and gave him ten children. Simultaneously he was involved with Mary McGonigal, who bore him five more children.

There were others as well. Singer moved between these households with astonishing audacity, keeping them ignorant of one another for years. The arrangement collapsed spectacularly in 1860. Mary Ann Sponsler spotted Singer driving down Fifth Avenue in an open carriage—seated beside him was Mary McGonigal.

The confrontation that followed made headlines across the city. Investigators discovered the full scope of his deception: four families in Manhattan alone, at least sixteen children. Accused of bigamy and adultery, Singer fled to England. There he met Isabella Eugénie Boyer, a nineteen-year-old French woman of striking beauty.

Some historians believe she later served as the model for the Statue of Liberty, though this remains disputed. Singer married her in 1863, and they produced six more children. He never returned to live in America. Singer died in July of 1875, leaving a fortune of approximately thirteen million dollars.

His will divided the money among twenty of his surviving children, though not equally. One son who had supported his mother during her divorce proceedings received only five hundred dollars. Edward Clark emerged from this chaos with control of the Singer Manufacturing Company. He was sixty-four years old, one of the wealthiest men in America, and ready for a new venture.

He turned his attention to real estate—specifically, to a radical idea that challenged everything wealthy New Yorkers believed about how respectable people should live. Clark was about to build an apartment house, not for the working class, but for the rich. Everyone told him it was impossible. The wealthy would never consent to live beside strangers.

They would never ride elevators with their neighbors. They would never abandon the privacy and prestige of owning their own homes. Clark listened to the skeptics. Then he bought land on the most remote stretch of Manhattan he could find, and he began to build.

—

In the 1870s, respectable New Yorkers did not live in apartments. Apartments were for immigrants, for the working poor, for families crammed into the tenements of the Lower East Side. The wealthy lived in private homes: town houses along Fifth Avenue, mansions with servants’ quarters and carriage houses. To suggest that a banker might share a roof with strangers was unthinkable.

Edward Clark saw things differently. He had watched the cities of Europe for years. In Paris, in London, in Vienna, wealthy families occupied grand apartment buildings without any loss of social standing. Why should New York be different?

The city was growing rapidly; land values were climbing; maintaining a private mansion required enormous expense. Others had already tested the concept. In 1869, a building called the Stuyvesant had opened on East Eighteenth Street, offering respectable middle-class families a new way to live. It proved successful enough to inspire imitators, but nobody had yet attempted to lure the truly wealthy away from their mansions.

Clark decided to experiment on a small scale first. In 1879, he commissioned architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh to design an apartment building called the Van Corlear on Seventh Avenue near Fifty-fifth Street. It attracted solid, respectable tenants. But Clark wanted something grander.

The site he selected made observers question his judgment. In 1880, the Upper West Side was barely a neighborhood at all. The land west of Central Park remained largely undeveloped: rocky outcrops, scattered wooden structures, open ground stretching toward the Hudson River. East of the park, elegant town houses lined the avenues; the west side, with its steeper terrain and lack of amenities, had attracted almost no investment.

Land was cheap precisely because nobody wanted it. Clark purchased a plot at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Eighth Avenue—later renamed Central Park West—covering approximately forty-one thousand square feet. The location offered advantages: Seventy-second Street was one of the wider cross-town roads; the plot sat on a slight rise with views across the island; Central Park lay directly to the east. But the distance from fashionable society seemed insurmountable.

Critics took to calling Clark’s project his folly. The name “Dakota” emerged during this period as well, either from Clark’s fondness for the names of new western states or from jokes about its remote location; historians still debate the origin. There were practical reasons for skepticism beyond snobbery. The Upper West Side had almost no transportation connections.

Walking to the business districts downtown took well over an hour; horse-drawn omnibuses were slow and unreliable. But the Ninth Avenue Elevated Railway had opened in 1879, providing the first direct transit link between the Upper West Side and Lower Manhattan. This development appears to have influenced Clark’s thinking. Clark also understood something about the emerging American bourgeoisie.

According to contemporary accounts, he told the West Side Association in December of 1879 that few persons were “princely enough” to wish to occupy an entire palace. Many successful professionals would welcome the convenience of apartment living, provided the apartments were grand enough to satisfy their pride. His solution was to create something unlike anything New York had seen: not merely an apartment building, but a palace divided into private homes, where the burdens of maintenance, heating, and staffing would be shared. When asked why he had chosen to become a real estate developer so late in life, his answer was characteristically direct.

He wanted, he said, to make money. Work began in late October of 1880. Clark instructed Hardenbergh to spare no expense. The construction budget reached approximately two million dollars; individual apartments would cost roughly twenty-five thousand dollars each to build, more than three times what Clark had spent per unit at the Van Corlear.

—

Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was thirty-three years old when Edward Clark asked him to design what would become the most famous apartment building in American history. Born in 1847 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he had trained from 1865 to 1870 under Detlef Lienau, a German-born architect who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This background exposed him to European design traditions most American architects knew only from books. The Dakota was his second major opportunity, and he made it count.

The design defies easy classification. Some architectural historians describe it as German Renaissance Revival, pointing to the high gables, deep roofs, and robust ornamentation that recall the town halls of Northern Europe. Others see French influences, suggesting the design evokes the châteaux of the Francis I period. One critic dismissed such categories entirely and called it “brewery brick Victorian neo-Gothic eclectic.

” Hardenberg seems to have drawn freely from multiple traditions, combining elements in ways that felt original. The structure rises eight stories above street level, with an additional floor tucked beneath the steep roof lines. The exterior is composed primarily of buff-colored brick trimmed with sandstone and decorated with terracotta panels. The roofline bristles with dormers, gables, and chimneys, creating a silhouette more reminiscent of a Hanseatic town hall than a New York residence.

The footprint is roughly square, organized around a central courtyard that forms an H shape when viewed from above. The courtyard allowed natural light to reach apartments on all four sides, provided ventilation, and offered residents a private outdoor space shielded from the city streets. The main entrance faces Seventy-second Street through a grand archway approximately sixteen feet wide and twenty feet tall—dimensions sufficient for horse-drawn carriages to pass through comfortably. Residents arriving home could be deposited directly in the courtyard, protected from weather and shielded from public view.

Above the entrance, terracotta panels, decorative ironwork, and carved stonework proliferate. According to some accounts, portraits of a man and woman appear above the doorway, possibly depicting Isaac Singer and his wife Isabella, though this identification remains uncertain. A figure that appears to represent a Native American looks out from the roofline. Inside, Hardenbergh planned sixty-five individual apartments, no two identical—a deliberate choice reflecting Clark’s understanding of his intended residents.

The apartments ranged from four rooms to as many as twenty. Four main staircases and four passenger elevators occupied the corners of the courtyard for residents. Servants used entirely separate routes: four additional service staircases and four service elevators at the midpoints of each courtyard side led directly to the kitchens and back rooms. The courtyard itself was divided into two levels; a lower level, accessible by ramps from both Seventy-second and Seventy-third streets, handled all service functions.

Delivery wagons could enter, unload, and depart without ever appearing in the spaces reserved for the wealthy occupants. Construction employed innovative techniques. The foundation walls measured an estimated three to four feet thick. The Dakota used traditional load-bearing masonry with iron beams and concrete floors.

Between the layers of flooring, workers reportedly packed mud taken from Central Park, a technique intended to provide soundproofing and fire resistance. The mechanical systems were remarkably advanced. Clark specified that the Dakota should offer every modern convenience. The structure would have its own power plant, generating electricity at a time when much of Manhattan still relied on gas lighting.

A central heating system would warm the building. Hydraulic elevators would carry residents to upper floors. To reassure nervous residents about safety, the power plant was positioned not within the main structure but beneath a garden on the adjacent lot to the west—if the boilers exploded, the damage would not directly threaten the apartments. Construction progressed through 1881 and 1882.

The massive structure gradually took shape on the undeveloped lots of the Upper West Side. But Edward Clark would not live to see his project completed. —

In the autumn of 1882, as workers swarmed over the rising structure at Seventy-second Street, Clark fell ill at his country estate in Cooperstown. He was seventy years old.

He had spent the past two years watching his most ambitious project take shape, but he would never walk through the finished Dakota. Edward Clark died of malarial fever on October 14th, 1882. The Dakota was roughly two years from completion. His obituaries focused on the Singer Manufacturing Company; the strange apartment house rising on the Upper West Side received mention as an eccentricity.

Clark’s estate was valued at approximately twenty-five million dollars, with some estimates running as high as fifty million. His will distributed portions to various family members, but the bulk of his real estate holdings, including the unfinished Dakota, passed to his grandson, Edward Severin Clark. The boy was just twelve years old. Trustees stepped in to handle the estate during Edward Severin’s minority.

Construction continued through the winter of 1882 and into 1883. Hardenbergh remained as architect, supervising the finishing work. In August of 1883, plasterers went on strike to protest the employment of non-union laborers; within a month, work resumed. Craftsmen completed the interior details, laid the intricate floor patterns, and prepared every surface for the residents who would soon arrive.

The neighborhood was changing as well. The building’s presence announced that the Upper West Side was open for development. By September of 1884, the *Real Estate Record* reported that the Dakota would be ready for occupancy on October 1st, with yearly rents ranging from $1,500 to $5,000. One quarter of the units had already been rented.

By the time the building officially opened in late October, every single apartment was spoken for. The first tenants represented exactly the class Clark had hoped to attract: lawyers, brokers, merchants, even a stenographer. They were prosperous, but none appeared on the Four Hundred, the exclusive list of New York society’s inner circle. The *New York Daily Graphic* declared it one of the most perfect apartment houses in the world.

The skeptics had been silenced. A waiting list had formed. The Dakota had proven that prosperous New Yorkers would live in apartments—provided the building was grand enough to make such arrangements feel like privileges rather than compromises. —

For seventy-seven years, the Dakota belonged to one family.

When Edward Severin Clark reached adulthood in the early 1890s and assumed direct control, the building had already established itself. For forty-five years, between 1884 and 1929, the building never had a single vacancy. Families arrived and stayed for generations. The Clarks did not need the rental income; the sewing machine company continued to dominate its industry.

Rents remained surprisingly modest. Long-term tenants found their rates held steady for decades. Among the early distinguished tenants were members of the Steinway family. The Dakota attracted not merely wealth but culture.

Edward Severin Clark died on September 19th, 1933, just weeks before the building’s fiftieth anniversary. He left no children. Ownership passed to his youngest brother, Steven Carlton Clark—a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art who had also established the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1939. He intended to continue operating the Dakota exactly as his brother had.

For nearly three decades under his stewardship, little changed. The building even retained its original hydraulic elevators. But time was working its transformations. The elaborate services that had defined Dakota living began to disappear.

The laundry service went first, along with the tailoring and the resident housekeeper. Shortly after the Second World War, the dining room closed permanently. By the 1950s, the servants’ quarters on the upper floors had been converted into apartments. The staff that remained, forty-five people by 1960, down from the original 150, no longer needed dormitories.

The tenant population was shifting. By mid-century, many residents were diplomats, theatrical figures, or publishers. The building particularly appealed to people in the entertainment industry because of its proximity to the Broadway theater district. Steven Clark himself never lived in the building.

When he died on September 17th, 1960, at age seventy-eight, his will did not leave the Dakota to his heirs. He bequeathed it to the Clark Foundation, the charitable organization he had established in 1931. The tenants soon discovered a devastating legal reality: under New York State law, a charitable foundation could not hold property that failed to generate profit. And the Dakota, for all its prestige, had never truly been profitable.

—

In the weeks after Zeckendorf’s call, the situation shifted. Zeckendorf’s bid did not succeed. Instead, in January of 1961, a different developer, the Glickman Corporation, purchased the Dakota and an adjoining lot for $4. 6 million.

Lewis Glickman intended to demolish the building and construct what he boasted would be New York City’s largest apartment tower. But the Dakota’s residents were not without resources. Through the winter and early spring, the tenants organized. They formed a cooperative corporation.

They negotiated with Glickman, appealing to sentiment, publicity, and financial pressure. In April of 1961, they announced an agreement to purchase the Dakota for $4. 8 million—two hundred thousand more than Glickman had paid just months earlier. Glickman would keep the adjoining lot.

Those who wished to remain would buy shares in the cooperative, converting from renters to owners. Many long-term residents who had paid artificially low rents for decades now faced monthly charges that exceeded their old payments. Not everyone could afford the transition. An enclave of former servants of the Portuguese consul who had remained on the eighth floor, paying no rent even after their employer departed for Lisbon years earlier, faced an impossible situation.

But most residents found ways to stay. In November of 1961, the transaction was completed. The Dakota’s tenants officially became its owners. The Glickman Corporation sold the adjacent lot that August; a bland apartment tower called the Mayfair rose on the site where gardens had once served the Dakota’s residents.

The new cooperative faced immediate challenges. Under the Clarks, all maintenance had been funded from family resources. Now those costs fell to the residents. In 1974, the co-op board undertook major repairs to the aging elevators; the cost came to $500,000, approximately five thousand per apartment.

The residents paid it. —

In 1967, Roman Polanski came to New York searching for the perfect building to appear in his new horror film. Ira Levin’s novel *Rosemary’s Baby* had been published earlier that year; the story followed a young couple who move into a brooding Manhattan apartment building called The Bramford, where their elderly neighbors turn out to be members of a satanic cult. Levin had drawn inspiration from several old Manhattan apartment buildings and even included a knowing wink in the novel: when the character Hutch tries to dissuade Rosemary from moving into the Bramford, he suggests she consider the Dakota instead.

Polanski needed something old, ornate, vaguely sinister. He found the Dakota. Principal photography began on August 21st, 1967. The building’s management refused to allow filming inside, so all interior scenes were constructed on soundstages in Hollywood.

But the exteriors—the gabled roofline, the ornate facade, the arched entrance—gave the film its visual foundation. The production was difficult. Polanski’s perfectionism drove costs four hundred thousand dollars over budget. Midway through filming, Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow’s husband, served her with divorce papers on set.

One scene became legendary: when Farrow hesitated to film a sequence showing Rosemary wandering into Fifth Avenue traffic, Polanski pointed to her pregnancy padding and assured her that no one would hit a pregnant woman. He then followed her into the street himself, operating a handheld camera. *Rosemary’s Baby* opened on June 12th, 1968. The picture earned over thirty million dollars.

The Dakota had become famous in an entirely new way—as The Bramford, a place of conspiracy and nightmare. The film was eventually selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. —

The Dakota had attracted artists from the very beginning. Tchaikovsky visited during his American tour in 1891, dined in the building, and marveled at its amenities.

Then in the middle of the twentieth century, the actors began to arrive. Boris Karloff was among the first. The British actor had achieved international fame in 1931 as the monster in *Frankenstein*. By the 1950s, he had moved to New York and taken an apartment in the Dakota with his wife Evelyn.

Some residents reportedly objected, fearing a performer might lower the building’s tone. Their fears proved unfounded: Karloff was a gentleman, soft-spoken and cultured. He remained in the building until his death in 1969. Karloff opened the door.

Lillian Gish took an apartment. Judy Garland lived briefly in the building during the 1960s. Lauren Bacall arrived in 1961, the same year the tenants organized to save the building; she purchased a nine-room apartment for $68,000 and would live in the Dakota for fifty-three years. Leonard Bernstein moved into a second-floor apartment with sweeping views of Central Park; his apartment became a gathering place for musicians and intellectuals.

Roberta Flack moved in during the early seventies, becoming the Dakota’s first African-American resident. Among the residents in 1973 was the actor Robert Ryan, who was dying of cancer. His apartment on the seventh floor would soon become available. A young English musician and his Japanese-American wife were looking for a place to live.

They had heard about the Dakota. Their names were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. —

In the spring of 1973, a former Beatle and his avant-garde wife were looking for a new home in Manhattan. Their assistant made inquiries at the Dakota.

As it happened, Robert Ryan was preparing to vacate unit 72 on the seventh floor—his wife had recently died, and he could no longer bear to remain in the space they had shared. Ryan himself would die of lung cancer within months. A single viewing was all it took. The place ran half the length of a city block: four bedrooms, stunning views across Central Park.

But what truly captivated John was the feel of it—heavy brass light switches, sit-down elevators operated by attendants in uniform, mahogany and oak paneling throughout. It reminded him of Victorian Liverpool. The co-op board was not immediately enthusiastic. Some residents feared the couple would host loud parties.

There had been drug-related charges in England. But the Lennons proved the skeptics wrong: once installed, they kept almost entirely to themselves. They gave no parties. They sought absolute privacy.

Devoted fans knew exactly where to find them. Despite security guards and the gated entrance, admirers sometimes slipped inside and roamed the corridors. Lauren Bacall was known to scold the loiterers; this made some of them cry, which upset John. The Lennons eventually owned five units in the Dakota.

On October 9th, 1975, everything changed. That day was John’s thirty-fifth birthday—and the day his son Sean Ono Lennon was born. John had an older son, Julian, from his first marriage, but that relationship had suffered during Beatlemania. When Sean arrived, John made a decision: he retired from music.

For the next five years, he became a househusband. He baked bread, supervised the nanny, sang his son to sleep. His guitar hung on a nail above the bed, untouched for months at a time. In July 1976, John finally received his green card after years of legal battles.

In 1978, he and Yoko purchased a six-hundred-acre dairy farm in upstate New York, and John bought a herd of 122 Holstein cows. He seemed to be building a life as far from rock stardom as possible. By the summer of 1980, Sean was approaching his fifth birthday. John had been away from recording for half a decade.

Then something shifted. In June, he traveled to Bermuda with an acoustic guitar. Alone with his thoughts, he began writing again: “Woman,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Watching the Wheels,” “Starting Over. ” He called Yoko, playing the new compositions over the phone.

They decided to make a record together. The album was called *Double Fantasy*. It was released on November 17th. Reviews were mixed, but sales were strong.

John gave interviews for the first time in years, speaking openly about his joy at returning. He spoke of more records. He spoke of touring. Three weeks after the release, on December 8th, John and Yoko spent the afternoon at the record plant working on a track of hers called “Walking on Thin Ice.

” John added a guitar part that crackled with energy. When they finished, he turned to his wife. “Yoko,” he said, “I think you just cut your first number one. ”

They left the studio and headed home.

Sean would be waiting. It was almost his bedtime. —

If you stand at the windows of the Dakota and look across Central Park West, you can see a teardrop-shaped clearing in the trees. This is Strawberry Fields, the memorial Yoko Ono created for her husband.

It did not exist when John was alive. The patch of land at Seventy-second Street was an unremarkable section of Central Park—but it happened to be where John and Yoko took their daily walks. Ten days after the murder, on December 18th, 1980, city council member Henry Stern introduced legislation to rename this section of the park. On March 26th, 1981, the designation became official.

The tear-shaped dell would be called Strawberry Fields, after the Beatles song John had written in 1966. The song itself was named for Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home near the house where John grew up in Liverpool. Yoko wanted to transform the New York site into a garden of peace. In an open letter published in the *New York Times* in 1981, she invited countries from around the world to contribute plants and stones.

She did not want a statue. “It would be nice to have the whole world in one place,” she wrote, “one field living and growing together in harmony. ”

More than 120 countries sent donations: an oak tree from Great Britain, dogwoods from Monaco, tulip bulbs from the Netherlands, maples from Canada. Yoko contributed one million dollars.

She worked closely with Bruce Kelly, the chief landscape architect for the Central Park Conservancy, to create something peaceful and alive. At the western point of the garden, artisans from Naples, Italy, crafted a circular mosaic of black and white stones in a starburst pattern. At its center was a single word: IMAGINE. On October 9th, 1985, Strawberry Fields was dedicated.

The date was John’s birthday—he would have been forty-five. It was also Sean’s tenth birthday. Yoko stood before several hundred guests with her arm around her son. “This garden is the result of all of us dreaming together,” she told the crowd.

“It’s our way of taking a sad song and making it better. ”

—

In February 1969, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Dakota as an official city landmark. Three years later, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1976, it received the highest honor, designation as a National Historic Landmark.

The structure that critics once called Clark’s Folly was now recognized as one of the most significant in America. Getting through those gates has never been easy. When the tenants converted the Dakota to a cooperative in 1961, they created a board with the power to approve or reject prospective buyers. Over the decades, the list of rejected applicants has become almost as famous as the list of residents.

Madonna applied and was turned away. So was Billy Joel. So was Cher. Carly Simon was rejected.

Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas were refused. Alex Rodriguez was denied. The filmmaker Judd Apatow was refused. The reasons are rarely disclosed.

Some rejections reportedly stemmed from concerns about fans and paparazzi; others from questions about lifestyle. What the board seems to prize is discretion. The Dakota offers privacy in a city where privacy is almost impossible to find. Residents do not discuss their neighbors with reporters.

They understand that the mystique depends on a certain silence. Today, apartments here sell for prices that would have astonished Edward Clark. Units have been listed for as much as twenty million dollars. Even modest units command several million.

The annual maintenance fees can reach six figures. And yet the Dakota remains something more than real estate. Tourists gather on the sidewalk outside; they come because Rosemary walked through that archway in a film that still disturbs; they come because John Lennon signed an autograph in that entrance and never made it inside. From the upper floors, residents can still look out over Central Park.

Directly below, just across the street, lies Strawberry Fields. The IMAGINE mosaic is visible from certain windows. The Dakota stands at the intersection of memory and money, art and exclusivity, fame and privacy. For some, it represents the Gilded Age dream of luxury and refinement.

For others, it is The Bramford, a place of nightmare. For millions of Beatles fans, it will always be the place where John Lennon came home. The gates still open. The courtyard still beckons.

The apartments, no two alike, still shelter those who have earned the right to call this place home. The Dakota endures.