John Lennon called New York, where he moved in 1971, “the greatest place on earth.” Lennon with Yoko Ono in 1972.

By ANTHONY DeCURTIS

As cutbacks loom in every sector of New York City’s economic life, the specter of the 1970s seems increasingly near as well. This being New York, of course, those days of near bankruptcy, graffiti-scarred subway cars, escalating crime rates and a dwindling population evoke a fond nostalgia for some.

In the June issue of Vanity Fair, for example, the critic James Wolcott gleefully recalls a time when real New Yorkers walked the streets with bravado while “the tourists looked scared. Getting back to their hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists.”

That shell-shocked town is where John Lennon chose to make his home with his wife, Yoko Ono, in August 1971, as “John Lennon: The New York City Years,” an exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex in Manhattan, documents.

“New York is the greatest place on earth,” Lennon insisted at the time. For all his worldliness as an artist, he had led a sheltered life with the Beatles, shuttling from hotels to concert halls to airplanes when on tour, and living isolated in the suburban “stockbroker belt” outside London when in England.

So he embraced the heady freedom New York offered. New Yorkers, in turn, saw the city anew through his wide, appreciative eyes. Sadly, such open-heartedness would prove his undoing.

In a way that would be unthinkable now for one of the most famous men in the world, Lennon and Ono rented a two-room apartment on Bank Street in the West Village , and bought bicycles to get around town.

As a student at Sarah Lawrence College and an artist in New York in the 1950s and ‘60s, Ono was intimately familiar with the city. “She made me walk around the streets and parks and squares and examine every nook and cranny,” Lennon said. “In fact you could say I fell in love with New York on a street corner.”

His proximity to the waterfront docks reminded him of his hometown port city of Liverpool, as did the characteristic gruffness of New Yorkers. “I like New Yorkers because they have no time for the niceties of life,” he said. “They’re like me in this. ”

When the Nixon administration used a minor drug conviction in England as a pretext for kicking the politically outspoken Lennon out of the country, the city rallied behind him. The Hall of Fame exhibition includes a letter from Mayor John V. Lindsay to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, recounting Lennon’s charitable and artistic contributions to New York and requesting that he be permitted to stay.

In 1975 the government dropped its case, and Lennon got his permanent resident card from the immigration service. That year, Ono gave birth to their son Sean. “I feel higher than the Empire State Building,” Lennon declared.

By this time, the family was living uptown in the Dakota apartment building on 72nd Street and Central Park West, a step up from their West Village home but hardly as posh then as it would eventually become. When the couple began working on the album “Double Fantasy” in 1980, life in New York seemed to be on firmer - and safer - footing.

Lennon was eager to return to public life, and he was still singing the praises of his adopted city. “I can go right out this door now and go in a restaurant,” he told a BBC reporter on December 6, 1980, in an interview to promote the album’s release. “You want to know how great that is?”

Two days later, Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota. He was 40 years old. He had just returned home from a recording session with Ono and, rather than have their car pull directly into the Dakota’s driveway, he got out at the curb so he could greet the fans waiting outside. It was an emotionally generous gesture, maybe even a naive one: trusting the city too much, underestimating its dangers.

In the years since Lennon’s death, New York has often seemed like two cities: one where the famous and wealthy played in a luxurious bubble, and the other, grittier one where everybody else lived. Lennon tried to act as if those worlds could be bridged. New York is safer now, statistics say. But underestimating the dangers may still prove a fatal mistake.