Luxury apartment living was invented right here, at the Dakota. The Dakota was built in 1884 by Edward Clark, the sewing machine magnate, at a time when wealthy New Yorkers thought shared residential buildings were for the poor, not the prosperous. Clark named it the Dakota to suggest how far from civilization it seemed, since the Upper West Side in 1884 was still largely fields and shanties.
He filled it with amenities unheard of in residential buildings: a restaurant, a laundry, central heating, and apartments with twelve- to fourteen-foot ceilings. It worked: wealthy tenants came, and within a generation apartment living was fashionable. Over the decades its residents have included Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, Boris Karloff, and Rudolf Nureyev.
John Lennon moved in with Yoko Ono in 1973 and was killed in the archway in 1980. Notice the German Renaissance facade above you, its ornate gables and finials rising above Central Park West, and the archway on 72nd Street, still guarded by a doorman, still as forbidding as the day it was built.