Seventy second and Central Park West at dusk with the first snow coming down: the gabled fortress of an apartment house, the carriage arch off 72nd Street into its courtyard and its two fountains, and across the avenue the round mosaic in the park with its one word, flowers, and somebody playing. The works hang round the courtyard, in the arch, and on the park wall.
The Dakota at 72nd Street and Central Park West was built between 1880 and 1884 to designs by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh for Edward Cabot Clark of the Singer Manufacturing Company. Its main entrance is a double height carriage archway on 72nd Street into the courtyard. It became a city landmark in 1969 and a National Historic Landmark in 1976. John Lennon lived there and was killed at its entrance on December 8, 1980; Strawberry Fields, across the street in Central Park, was dedicated to him on October 9, 1985, around a mosaic that reads Imagine.
Source · The Dakota, Wikipedia ↗
The sandstone and brick block with its gables, dormers and iron railings, the deep arched carriage entrance with the sentry box, the square inner courtyard with two fountains, the teardrop park across the avenue with the black and white mosaic ringed with flowers. Mood: december dusk. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.