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 thirty years, as a staff member at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, as a freelance consultant, and as a teacher. He has worked 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. Andrew has also 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; and The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City 1908-1929 (2009), which won several prizes, including the Society of Architectural Historians prestigious Antoinette Forrester Downing Award. In recent years he has contributed essays to books on the history of Green-Wood Cemetery (“Architecture at Green-Wood,” in Green-Wood at 175: Looking Back/Looking Forward) in Brooklyn and Woodlawn Cemetery (“Designing Woodlawn: Buildings and Landscapes,” in Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art & Landscape at Woodlawn) in the Bronx, and co-curated the exhibition Saving Place: Fifty Years of New York City Landmarks, also contributing an essay to the exhibit’s catalogue (“Designating New York City Landmarks”).
His current research project involves a study of garment lofts and the development of New York’s Garment District. 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 (spring 2011) 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. In 2015, he was a co-founder of the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project, which is developing a website and database of places in New York City associated with LGBT history and people. At Columbia, Dolkart teaches classes in American architecture and in the architecture and development of New York City, as well as Historic Preservation studios.