The Dakota is a historic apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street "72nd Street (Manhattan)") and Central Park West "Central Park West (Manhattan)") in Manhattan, New York City. It was built between October 25, 1880 and October 27, 1884.[2]​.

The building became famous worldwide when musician John Lennon, former member of The Beatles, was murdered at its doors.

The architectural firm of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was hired to carry out the design for Edward Clark, director of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. This firm also designed the Plaza Hotel.

High gables and deep windowed roofs, terracotta panels and spandrels, niches, balconies and balustrades give the building a German Renaissance-style appearance. However, its structure and floor plan reflect a strong influence of French architecture in the design of houses that became known in New York in the 1870s. The construction is famous for being the place where the musician John Lennon was murdered.

According to popular culture, the Dakota was so named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was as sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. However, the first records of this name are found in a newspaper story from 1933. The name Dakota was given to the building due rather to the taste that its founder, Clark, had for the states and territories of the new West. Above the 72nd Street entrance is a figure of a Dakota Indian. The Dakota Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

The Dakota is built on a square block around a central courtyard, accessible through an archway from the main entrance, where there is a carriage gate large enough for horse-drawn carriages to pass through, allowing passengers to alight while sheltering from the weather. From the stables of the Dakota on 72nd Street and from those on Amsterdam Street elevators took the carriages to the upper floors. The Dakota's barn remained in operation as a garage until February 2007.

The general layout of the apartments follows the French style of the time, with all the main rooms connected to each other in the traditional way, but also being accessible from a hallway, an arrangement that allowed a natural passage for guests from one room to another, especially on festive occasions, and also allowed the domestic staff to circulate separately to carry out their work and access the main rooms. These, like the living rooms and the master bedroom, are on the street side, while the dining room, kitchen, and other auxiliary rooms are oriented towards the interior of the building's central patio. The apartments have windows on both sides, which was a novelty in New York at that time (in the Stuyvesant Building, which was built in 1869, just ten years earlier, and which was considered the first apartment building in New York, only some rooms had windows on both sides). Some living rooms are 15 meters long, and most ceilings are 4.3 m high; The floors are floored with oak, cherry and mahogany.