The Dakota

The Dakota is a cooperative apartment building at 1 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, and is the oldest surviving luxury apartment building in the city. Architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed it for the businessman Edward Cabot Clark, head of the Singer Manufacturing Company, building it between 1880 and 1884 in a German Renaissance revival style with deep dormered roofs, terracotta ornament, and a buff brick facade trimmed in sandstone, arranged as a nine story block around a central H shaped courtyard and entered through a double height archway. The building spurred the subsequent development of the Upper West Side as its city's first large residential project and is designated both a National Historic Landmark and a New York City Landmark. It has long housed prominent artists, actors, and musicians, and was the site of John Lennon's murder in 1980, before converting to cooperative ownership in 1961.