They gathered almost instantly, a tribute to the immediacy of modern mass communications.
Outside the squat red brick hospital on Manhattan’s West Side late Monday night, the crowd was partly serious. But there was more to it than that.
“He can’t go; he meant so much to everyone” said a grieving fan, a girls too young to remember the Beatles as an active group.
At first, there was some hope. There were conflicting reports on whether John Lennon had actually been killed by attacking gunman, or only wounded
They bystanders, indeed the hoard of often-cynical reporters who also flocked to the scene, clung that possibility
A Small Group of admirers knelt to pray aloud in hospital courtyard. “It’s the only hope now” once said
Less than an hour after Lennon was rushed to the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, a doctor in charge of the facility’s emergency room broke the news.
John Lennon one of four young men from Liverpool England. whose influence to music may never be equaled was dead.
In the brightly lighted and antiseptic corridor, there were gasps from the press. On the street, as news filtered out, there was open weeping.
“It’s worse than when Elvis went”. said Linda Greenman, a face in the crowd. “Elvis Presley had sort of completed what he was going to contribute. With the Beatles there was always feeling that somehow they might contribute more–all of them together.”
The Hospital stands on West 58th Street at that point where Columbus Avenue becomes Ninth Avenue. It is a busy location at any hour of the day or night.
But even cab drivers stood still outside this tragic site.
Lennon and his wife. Yoko Ono, both foreigners, were nonetheless consummate New Yorkers. They loved this city, and the affection was reciprocated.
A half-decade ago, when Lennon was fighting efforts by the Nixon administration to expel him from the United States because of a minor drug violation in England, it was the then mayor of New York, John Lindsay, who led the fight to allow him to stay.
That battle won, the couple plunged into the vibrant life of an adopted city, even dabbling in real estate by snapping up a number of apartments in their own fashionable cooperative building, the Dakota.
It was outside the Dakota that Lennon was killed Monday night. The doctor said he lost consciousness immediately: he would remember nothing of that last frantic ride through the streets of Manhattan
But at Amy’s Pub on Ninth Avenue and at Ralph’s Italian Restaurant accross from the hospital, the patrons insisted they would never forget the man who had died so near to them.
As long as there is music and as long as that art form is used to give meaning as well as pleasure, the world could never forget John Lennon.
Michael Coakley
