"I heard the news on the radio. I had come to New York six months before, to try to be a journalist. Without great success, until that day, 8 December 1980. I lived on the West Side, a few subway stops from 72nd street, but light years away from the elegance sophisticated Dakota, the building where John Lennon lived: an old building, the architecture of Manhattan, in Gothic style, vaguely menacing. There lived other VIPs, such as the actress Lauren Bacall, Roman Polanski, but not randomly chose him circled for Rosemary's baby, the film where John Cassavetes plays the devil's decided to put the poor pregnant Mia Farrow. Something of that scary place. Now everyone knew why.
When I arrived, there was the bloodstain on the sidewalk in front of the door, enclosed by yellow police tape. Plainclothes and uniformed police were still gathering evidence. But there was so many other people in front of the Dakota: young and old, hippies and ex-hippie, someone with a guitar, with many radios glued to your ear. They left flowers on the pavement, crying, singing his songs. The vigil went on all night, and the next day, December 9, had become a siege, which overflowed the adjacent lawn of Central Park, thousands and thousands of people, convened by word of mouth or by a simple need to be there, not to wait for an official funeral or sympathy, to show at once, spontaneously, the pain. The
radio stations in New York participated in their own way, constantly transmitting the most popular songs of Lennon, since the Beatles to the most recent, and when the radio hanging from tree branches Central Park sounded notes of Imagine, the song became one of the hymns of pacifism, he seemed to hear a collective sigh rise from the park.
Someone wrote in those days it was as if she were dead, along with John Lennon, age, and it was so, even if we on the lawn in Central Park was well aware there is none: the '70s were over, years of ideologies, rebellions, protests, the attempt to split, and as full of errors to create a better world, and was starting another decade, the '80s, it would be very different, with President Ronald Reagan in Washington , Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in London, the yuppies in the place of the hippies. "
(Henry Franceschini, La Repubblica)
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