What is The Dakota

The Dakota is an actual building in New York City, a luxury apartment building constructed decades ago and still standing today. Its incorporation into the action is an example, like the incorporation of New York itself, of the author's use of actualities to illuminate his fiction. Also, the fact that in many ways it hasn't changed much (which may or may not be an actuality, neither the text nor the author's after-word is clear on the subject) symbolizes the way that some things remain unchanged by the passage of time, a key aspect of one of the novel's central themes. An apartment in the Dakota serves as Si's point of transition for his first few trips into the past.