Andrew Dolkart

Professor Andrew S. Dolkart is a graduate of Colgate University and Columbia’s Historic Preservation Program. He has been active in historic preservation in New York City for over forty years, as a staff member at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, as a freelance consultant, and as a professor. Andrew has written extensively about his passion, the architecture and development of New York City, focusing in particular on the city’s everyday, vernacular building types and how they influenced the character of neighborhoods. His books include Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development, which won the American Association of Publishers award for best academic book in architecture and planning; the award-winning Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street; The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City 1908-1929, which won several prizes, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ prestigious Antoinette Forrester Downing Award; and 1048 Fifth Avenue: From Mansion to Museum, about the Neue Galerie’s building.

In recent years he has contributed essays to books on the history of the Morgan Library, “Preserving Murray Hill: The Morgans Fight for a Neighborhood”; Woodlawn Cemetery, “Designing Woodlawn: Buildings and Landscapes”; and Green-Wood Cemetery, “Architecture at Green-Wood.” Dolkart is also a co-founder and co-director of the award-winning NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project and was honored with a Pillar of New York award for this project from the Preservation League of New York State. He has also written many of the entries on the Sites Project’s website and several articles about LGBTQ history in New York.

Dolkart works extensively with neighborhood groups on preservation efforts and has completed scores of National Register nominations, Landmark Commission designation reports, historic resource surveys for environmental reviews, and urban cultural resource inventories.

His current research project involves a study of the physical fabric of New York’s garment industry. Two articles on this subject have already been published – “The Fabric of New York City’s Garment District: Architecture and Development in an Urban Cultural Landscape,” in the journal Buildings and Landscapes, and “From Rag Trade to Riches: Abraham E. Lefcourt Builds the Garment District,” in the book Chosen Capitol: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism. Dolkart curated an exhibition about the Garment District’s skyscraper lofts at the Skyscraper Museum.

In addition, Dolkart is a board member of several local preservation groups, has been interviewed for many documentaries, is quoted extensively in the media, and is well-known for his architectural walking tours of New York. At Columbia, Dolkart teaches classes in American architecture, in the architecture and development of New York City, and on preserving and interpreting invisible histories, and a Historic Preservation studio for new preservation graduate students.