The Dakota, New York City’s oldest remaining luxury apartment building, was mocked as Clark’s Folly when Singer sewing machine head Edward Cabot Clark built it at 72nd Street and Central Park West, then a muddy outpost an hour by carriage from the Ladies’ Mile. In the 1880s apartment blocks meant tenements, so Clark and architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh built a Northern Renaissance fortress between 1880 and 1884 with bluestone foundation walls three to four feet thick and floors of concrete topped with nine inches of earth to block sound. The popular story that the name mocked its remoteness first appeared in print in 1933; Clark simply loved the names of western states and territories. Carriages drove through an archway into a 90-foot H-shaped courtyard, and elevators in four corners opened into private foyers, so no one walked a shared hallway.

Apartments ranged from four to 20 rooms, no two alike, with Minton tiles, marble fireplaces, and separate stairs and elevators for servants. It was fully rented by October 1884. By the 1950s it had become an enclave for theater people and artists, and in 1961 the Glickman Corporation bought it for $4.6 million to tear it down. Tenants bought it back for $4.8 million and formed a co-op, whose board went on to reject Madonna, Cher, Billy Joel, Alex Rodriguez, Gene Simmons, Carly Simon, and Judd Apatow. On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was murdered outside its gates, turning the private building into a global memorial.

• Why nine inches of loose dirt between floors worked as acoustic insulation in the 1880s
• A contemporary writer’s line that tenants could enter the courtyard but thieves could not
• How a co-op sells shares and a lease rather than an apartment, giving the board near-total power over buyers
• Quiet hours banning instruments from 11 p.m. to 9 a.m. and rules requiring original doors and mantels to be stored in the basement
• A $32 million restoration of the facade to its 1884 appearance