For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Beatles fan. More specifically, a Lennon fan. My dad and I used to listen to their music together when I was a girl. I have the albums on disk and on vinyl. For my sixteenth birthday, my mom won tickets to a Beatles tribute band concert and I could not have been happier. I visited London (would still like to visit Liverpool) when I was 14 and loved seeing the memorabilia everywhere and walking where they walked. And I’ve always wanted to visit the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park and see the Dakota, where Lennon lived in NYC until his death in 1980.
Even though Josh isn’t really a Beatles fan (gasp), he knew I really wanted to go and we’d planned to spend Saturday in Central Park and the Upper West Side. It was a little more than a week from our trip, when doing some research that I realized I was flying into New York on December 8th. I decided to rearrange my plans a little and visit the memorial on the thirty-first anniversary of his death. After flying into LaGuardia, I took a cab to Central Park West and 72nd street, home of the Dakota.
The building was a lot larger than I expected, and beautiful. I felt so silly walking up to the front door to take pictures, but as I rounded the corner and saw the crowd of people I realized that I wasn’t the only one clamoring for a look.
After a now-famous photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz that landed John & Yoko on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, they went to the recording studio for the afternoon. On their way out, John signed an autograph for the man who would come back later in the day and shoot him in the entryway of his famous apartment building. Just across the street from his apartment, in Central Park, is a memorial and children’s garden dedicated to John. This is what I found when I got there…
I am so glad that I went on the anniversary — it was so neat to see so many people celebrating and singing his songs. There were flowers and mementos on the memorial and families were standing all around the circle singing and laughing. I bet I stayed for an hour and a half and even though I was all alone in the big city, I can’t think of a better way to start my trip.
Since I didn’t have anyone to take my picture, SD snapped one of me the next day when we were walking through Central Park.
Here are a few of the videos I shot while I was there!
