public

Heavily Investigated

The Dakota does not feel merely old — it feels occupied in ways its tenant roster cannot fully explain. John Lennon himself reported a "crying lady ghost" drifting through his apartment before he was shot dead at the building's own archway in 1980; witnesses later swore they saw him there still, glowing faintly, expression unreadable. Victorian children in period dress are said to laugh through the halls. A bearded man in wire-frame glasses haunts the basement — described well enough to match the builder who never lived to see it finished. Stand in that archway long enough and the building seems to remember everything.

Commissioned by Edward Cabot Clark of Singer Manufacturing and designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh — the same architect behind the Plaza and Waldorf Astoria — the Dakota opened in 1884 as Manhattan's first luxury apartment building for the upper class. Its name mocked its then-remote Upper West Side location, a wilderness joke that aged into legend. It became a NYC landmark in 1969 and a National Historic Landmark in 1972. Clark, notably, held séances there. He never lived to see it completed — a detail the building's ghost stories have since made rather difficult to overlook.