Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of the night when John Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. City Room asked readers for their recollections. Here is a selection, lightly edited.

I was 27 and at Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy Park when the TV over the bar blared the news. I left immediately to go to my boyfriend’s place in Chelsea, where I found him practically in shock. The next day I listened to a message he had left on my answering machine. He was sobbing, saying: “They’ve killed him. They’ve killed John Lennon.” I erased the message immediately. I never wanted to hear it again. I just realized: I’ve never been back to Pete’s, either.

— sally

I was 28 years old and a third-year associate at a law firm, working on a legal brief at a client’s office at Rockefeller Center. Another (more senior) lawyer and I had been poring over the brief, along with the client. The client was an incredible stickler for detail, questioning every comma and punctuation mark. My colleague and I finally managed to get out of there after midnight, and poured into a cab. The radio was on, and we learned then about the shooting. It was an incredibly sad, almost surreal moment. The idea that something this momentous had happened while I was working on a brief seemed ridiculous. I lived in Park Slope, and I went home and listened to the radio for a few hours before falling asleep. The next morning, the feeling of overwhelming sadness in N.Y.C. was palpable. All I could do was walk to the Dakota, where people were milling about and some were singing. I didn’t stay long.

— Philip



I was stationed on a U.S. Navy cruiser and we were operating off the coast of San Diego on a beautiful day. I was told by a fellow crew member that John Lennon had just been shot and killed in Manhattan. I remember with great clarity the angry emotion of the young man who told me the news.

— Guy

I was in my junior year of college in San Francisco, a sullen punk lying on the bed in my room in my parents’ house listening to Devo. My nemesis, my mother, entered looking ashen. I asked sarcastically, “Who died now?” When she told me, my face mirrored hers. That news shut me up.

— VA

I was a high school student at Curtis on Staten Island. My friends and I were all huge fans of the Beatles, and Lennon in particular. The next morning, a friend entered the sound booth for the public address system following the pledge of allegiance, and asked for a moment of silence in Lennon’s memory. He was disciplined by the school administration for making an unauthorized announcement.

A group of my friends all went to Central Park that Saturday for the longer period of silence. I remember that it was bitterly cold. We had fervent hopes that meaningful gun control laws would be enacted as a result of his senseless death. What a fitting tribute that would have been. Ah, youthful idealism, inspired by Lennon and never entirely squelched.

— Alyson W Reed

We learned about John’s death in then Communist Czechoslovakia by way of Radio Luxembourg. I was 9, and I remember my parents, especially my mom, being sad. Soon after, students started painting a particular wall in Prague’s old town with images of John Lennon and his message of peace. The authorities did not like it and painted the “Lennon wall,” as everyone knew it, over. It was always renewed within hours.

— Andrea

I had just walked a friend home to her apartment house on West 72nd Street about 100 yards from the Dakota. As I left the front of her building, I heard what sounded like a car backfire and within seconds heard people screaming and saw that it was coming from the Dakota. I, like many others, started to walk toward Central Park West, and almost immediately, sirens came screaming from everywhere.

I could not get close enough at the time to know what had happened. I walked home to my apartment and turned on the TV to hear the news. Like the day J.F.K. was shot, or the day M.L.K. was killed or R.F.K. was assassinated, that evening is burned into my brain. I remember the girl’s name, where we went to dinner, the weather, everything about that evening. The sound I heard must have the been the gun firing.

— David

I heard the gunshots, the first I’d ever heard. They sounded so much different than on TV. Crack-crack-crack. My parents and I looked down at the chaotic scene unfolding on West 72nd Street, 22 stories below and just east of our terrace. It was the first time I saw my parents both cry at the same time.

— Dinny

I was just a 6-year-old boy in my pajamas about to go to bed. I remember standing in our kitchen, looking up at the small TV that sat on a counter by our fridge. I remember my mother gasping and staring at the TV as if it were the only thing left in her world. She loved the Beatles, and I grew up mesmerized at the pictures on the “Let It Be” album cover and jacket. I thought all records had a picture of an apple in the middle.

I remember the look on my father’s face and the sound in his voice being unrecognizable; it seemed meek, defeated, as though the pallor in his face had overspread his entire being. That moment revealed to me that even a man who worked to build missile guidance systems could be shattered and silenced by the death of the man whose demise signaled the final blow to the turning of the tide toward good.

— Eric

Roosevelt, L.I., is a predominantly black middle-class hamlet, and so there were not a lot of Beatles’ fans in my neighborhood. I got hip to the Beatles when I heard as a child Stevie Wonder’s cover of “We Can Work It Out,” wondering who wrote that cool song. When I found out, I was hooked. Every time “Yellow Submarine” came on Channel 5’s “Sunday Afternoon Movie,” I watched. Didn’t understand all of it at the time.

So 30 years ago, I was watching “Prisoner Cell Block H” on Channel 11 when the news zipper came across that John had been shot and wounded outside the Dakota. I jumped out of the chair and sat next to screen out of shock and disbelief. Right before midnight, the second zipper came over that John Lennon had been shot and mortally wounded. I went to bed in a haze.

— KCJ

I was in a detention cell south Manila; my captors broke the news. The violence abated as everyone took in the loss of part of their life. Then the radio began churning out Beatles songs. I was 21 then, thinking that my future was over. … The songs permeated my dreams, gave consolation in my despair. Thirty years later, I am now part of the government I rebelled against, still struggling to find solutions to my people’s problems.

Yes John, I Imagined. …

and still do.

— busilak

I was 11 years old, living in Northern Ireland, waiting for my old man to finish in the bathroom when suddenly he stuck his head out (half-shaved) and shouted to me across the landing: “You like the Beatles, don’t you? John Lennon’s just been shot dead in New York!”

I went to school devastated. …

— Karl

I was 10, my stepfather was driving me home from a late soccer game and it came over the radio. He had to pull over and cry.

— Chris

I was 8 years old. I was looking for something in my mother’s bathroom, and came across a little bag with mine and my brother’s teeth, which made me realize there was no tooth fairy.

I was going to ask her about the tooth fairy, but when I went into her room, she was crying. When I asked why, she told me that Lennon had been shot. I knew who he was because music was a big part of our house growing up, but I had trouble understanding why she would cry for someone she never personally knew.