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Thirty years is a long time, but it’s a rare New Yorker who can’t tell you where he was the night of Dec. 8, 1980. As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moment news broke of John Lennon’s murder is a point frozen in time for those old enough to remember.
We asked local notables where they were that night, and how they reacted to the news that the beloved Beatle had been gunned down. Their answers reveal the many dimensions of Lennon’s persona: musical genius, cultural icon, New Yorker about town, peace activist and family man.
Ed Koch: I was at Gracie Mansion when I heard. We rode over to the Dakota, and crowds were already forming. There was great sadness in the city. He touched people in some mystical way. While he was not a New Yorker, his relationships, the things that he did in the press, the cover that was him naked with his wife — all of those made him unique, and in an inexplicable way reflected the vulnerability of NYC.
His wife, who I’d met on a number of occasions, asked to have a memorial in Central Park. Every other request like that I’d turned down, but everybody agreed that if it was unobtrusive it would be appropriate. We had a ceremony, and thousands of people came. There were several proposed names, and the one that just seemed to be correct was Strawberry Fields.
Jimmy Breslin: I was at home in Forest Hills. I heard it on the television and left right away. One thing I remember, when we were leaving, my son or my daughter was driving, and all the kids from the neighborhood were piling into the car. I had overlooked the fact that he meant that much to the kids.
I went to the Dakota, I went to the hospital; I went everyplace. I found the two cops who took him to the emergency room. There was a police car there, and I stopped and talked to them. And I got lucky. I could have had nothing. It made the next day’s paper.
It was big. I mean, you lost a great talent. I knew the guy. He was a lovely guy, you know. Fun. But you didn’t have time to think of it that night. That comes the next day.
Nora Ephron (who covered The Beatles’ first US visit for The Post): I remember two things about it. I had an English nanny for my kids, who virtually had a breakdown. She basically moved into the crowd at the vigil. But the thing that I felt so strongly, that everyone did, was that he had become such a New Yorker. And not just a New Yorker, a West Sider. And he had such a commitment to living a normal life. You’d see pictures of him walking through Central Park with Yoko, without bodyguards, without security, and that’s just the way he’d decided to live.
It was great, especially if you’d seen what it was like in the beginning, when they were such a target for every kind of invasion of privacy known to man. He was the real deal when it came to believing that his own goodness was contagious. So that was one of the things that was so devastating about his death. He’d made a commitment to a way of living in New York, and it was just tragic to feel he’d been wrong about it in some terrible way.
Al Sharpton: I was home, and I heard it on the news. I had met Lennon through some of his peace efforts, and through the fact that I was close with James Brown. So it stunned me.
People don’t realize how much of an icon he was even for those of use who weren’t in rock ’n’ roll, because he was a larger-than-life figure in the peace movement and in the counterculture. He also was one of the white artists who identified with black artists, and that’s why a lot of black people had respect for him. He was giving Billy Preston and others opportunities before crossover was an understood thing in the music industry, and that was a big deal to black artists.
Marshall Crenshaw (songwriter, former “Beatlemania” star): I lived in Pelham at the time with my wife, and we were just hanging out at home, watching a little black-and-white TV we had that we’d bought from a drugstore. The first announcement was that he’d been “shot by a local crazy” — that was the phrase the news guy used. A couple minutes later he was dead, and it was just unfathomable. I went into this state of shock that lasted a long time. I couldn’t think. I really did identify with him a lot when I was young, with that swagger he had.
On the one-year anniversary, I was at the Record Plant working on my first album. That’s where Lennon was the day he was shot, and it was really fresh in everybody’s mind, but especially for the people who worked at the studio, because they all knew him. The place felt sort of haunted. So we just sat around all day and people told stories about him. I think everybody was still feeling the pain of it.
Curtis Sliwa (Guardian Angels founder): We were on the No. 4 train heading uptown, going past Yankee Stadium, when the conductor came up to me and said, “Did you hear John Lennon is dead?” I’m thinking drug-induced psychosis, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, you name it. So I said, “Was it an OD?” and he said, “Oh no, he was shot on the Upper West Side.”
That was a time when a lot of people were packing their bags and fleeing because crime was everywhere, but you never thought it would touch someone like John Lennon. So that was just another chink in the armor, like, this is hopeless, this is totally out of control. It didn’t matter if you were in the Dakota or a public housing project — crime was everywhere.
Lenny Kaye (guitarist for Patti Smith): I was home listening to WNEW, and Vin Scelsa had just played my little punk rock single, “Child Bride.” I was kind of excited to hear myself on the radio, and then this. It’s hard to remember anything too specific, because the overwhelming sense is of shock. People started calling, and the last time I remember that kind of buzz going around was when Elvis passed away. Everybody had this sense that we’d just gotten John back, and now he was gone, and this time for good.
You expect some fast deaths on the outer edges of rock and roll, but he seemed to be living such a peaceful, centered existence. So it was the last thing you’d expect. After all the craziness he’d been through, why now?
Vin Scelsa: The news bulletin was very simple. It just said that a man identified as John Lennon had been shot and taken to Roosevelt Hospital. Six, seven minutes later the desk assistant came back in the room white as a ghost and said “He’s dead.”
I knew right away this was going to be beyond a pop star’s death. This was our youth. This was the ’60s. This was The Beatles. This was John.
Over the next hour, every single deejay wound up back at the station, and we held an on-air wake. We started putting calls on the air, which was not a typical thing for us to do, but it seemed like people desperately needed not only to express their anger and their sadness, but to be together.
I was on the air the night Bobby Kennedy was killed. I was on the air the week of Martin Luther King’s murder, through the Vietnam War, the Chicago convention of ’68. But nothing ever had the same impact.
— with reporting by Billy Heller