The Dakota, the apartment house New York thought was too far uptown

In 1884 the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West was mostly goats and shanties. Edward Clark, who had gotten rich on Singer sewing machines, built a nine story German Renaissance apartment house there anyway, with gables and dormers and a dry moat around the base.

Manhattan society thought he was insane. Respectable people lived in row houses. Apartments were for tenements. And the site was so remote that the running joke was that Clark might as well have built in the Dakota Territory. He liked the joke enough to keep it.

The building was designed to make apartment living defensible to the wealthy. Ceilings ran fourteen feet. Rooms were laid out so that servants could move through the building without crossing a guest. Every apartment had its own layout, so no two were alike, a quirk residents still argue about at board meetings. There was a private generator, a dining room that sent meals up by dumbwaiter, and a courtyard where carriages turned around out of the weather.

It filled immediately, and the neighborhood filled behind it. Within twenty years the empty blocks around the Dakota were a boulevard of apartment houses copying its logic.

The tenant list became a century of American culture. Boris Karloff. Judy Garland. Leonard Bernstein. Lauren Bacall for more than fifty years. John Lennon and Yoko Ono took a seventh floor apartment in 1973, and on a December night in 1980 the archway that Clark built to keep the weather off carriages became the most photographed doorway in the world.

The Dakota still stands with its dry moat and its gables, no longer remote, no longer a joke, the building that convinced New York it was fine to live in a box in the sky.