Exclusive | Yoko Ono to become the longest homeowner inside NYCs storied Dakota upon sale of $8M penthouse

Imagine all the people, livin’ for today — and for decades in the same home.Yoko Ono has long been known as an artist and an activist — and now the 93-year-old is on the cusp of adding another title to her name: the Grande Dame of the Dakota. Indeed, Ono will become the Dakota’s longest current homeowner when an apartment at the building’s tippy top completes its sale, The Post has learned.She moved into the storied Upper West Side property — the first luxury apartment building in America — with her late husband John Lennon 53 years ago.That penthouse, which asked $8 million for sale and is now under contract, was owned by the late art patron Steven Rubin, who bought at the Dakota in the late 1960s and added more space in subsequent years, according to statements by his daughter. The final price to be paid for that perch, as well as its new owner, are not yet known.With Rubin’s wife, Polly, passing last December, the property listed in June and went into contract this month — a testament to right pricing, deft marketing and the Dakota’s strong cache. The Rubins’ penthouse began as Gilded Age quarters for maids who worked for the matrons below.

Rubin subsequently bought the area above the initial apartment and connected the two spaces with a staircase.Views allowed him and his wife to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from the coveted comfort of their home, according to the listing from Sotheby’s International Realty’s Roberta Golubock.While city tax records and transfers show other residents of the Dakota, at 1 W.

72nd St., handing down their apartments to family members, no continuous ownership by the same person in the 94-unit building is apparent except for Ono.Her half-century-plus ownership of the seventh-floor sanctuary demonstrates not only staying power, but determination while traversing very devastating, and sweet, times there. Ono and Lennon moved into the Dakota soon after the Beatles disbanded and the pair create...