Spot where John Lennon was shot

On the night of 8 December 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed in the archway entrance of the Dakota Building at 1 West 72nd Street in Manhattan. He was 40 years old. Lennon and Yoko Ono were returning home at approximately 10:50pm from a recording session at the Record Plant when Mark David Chapman, who had been waiting outside the building since that afternoon, fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 Special revolver. Four hit Lennon in the back. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in a police car and pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15pm.

Chapman had met Lennon earlier that same day outside the Dakota, asking him to sign a copy of Double Fantasy — the album Lennon and Ono had released just three weeks earlier, his first new music in five years. Lennon signed it. Chapman waited for hours. When the Lennons returned that evening, Chapman called out "Mr. Lennon" and opened fire. He then sat down on the pavement, pulled out a copy of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and was reading it when police arrived.

Chapman, a 25-year-old former security guard from Honolulu, had travelled to New York specifically to kill Lennon. A former Beatles fan, he had grown fixated on what he perceived as Lennon's hypocrisy — the man who sang "Imagine no possessions" while living in one of Manhattan's most exclusive buildings. Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty years to life. He remains in prison and has been denied parole repeatedly since becoming eligible in 2000.

The Dakota itself is one of New York's most famous residential buildings — a grand, gated, German Renaissance-style apartment block built in 1884 and overlooking Central Park. Lennon and Ono had lived there since 1973. The building had also been used as the exterior location for Roman Polanski's 1968 film Rosemary's Baby. Lennon loved the building and the neighbourhood; he and Sean would walk through Central Park regularly.

Directly across the road, inside Central Park, is Strawberry Fields — a landscaped memorial dedicated to Lennon by the City of New York in 1985. At its centre is a circular black-and-white mosaic bearing the single word "Imagine." Flowers, candles, and tributes are left there daily. The Dakota's entrance is a private residential building and visitors should be respectful, but the archway where Lennon was shot is visible from the pavement on West 72nd Street.