The New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Lucy G. Moses Preservation Awards are among the highest honors for outstanding preservation accomplishments in New York City. Andrew Dolkart, Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP, is being honored this year for his decades of service to the field and to his students. In this interview, Emily R. Kahn, a 2021 graduate of the M.S. Historic Preservation program, spoke to Professor Dolkart about his work and the significance of this award to him.

Please join us virtually in celebrating Professor Dolkart at the 31st Annual Lucy G. Moses Preservation Leadership Awards on May 6 at 6:00pm EST. Register here.

EK: What does winning the Preservation Leadership Award mean to you?

AD: I think that one of the nicest things about winning the Landmarks Conservancy’s Preservation Leadership Award is being recognized by one’s colleagues and peers, and I think that’s really important. What I’ve always tried to do in my career is make a difference in communities in New York, and so it was really thrilling when I got the call from the Landmarks Conservancy that they were giving me this award because it’s really a recognition of the many decades that I’ve been working in trying to improve New York City communities.

EK: How have you been working to try to improve New York City communities?

AD: I believe that preservation is really a positive force in making communities livable places, both recognizing important architecture and not necessarily high style architecture, but all kinds of architecture, and making the city a livable place with a juxtaposition of old and new buildings. I work extensively with community groups. Over the years, I’ve worked with community groups almost all over the city, and that’s been really fulfilling. I worked for the Landmarks Commission, and I’ve advocated for landmarking, and I’ve written scores of National Register nominations. All of these are part of my efforts to preserve the architecture and the history of the city because I think that it makes New York a dynamic city to have these historic buildings.

EK: Have you worked with the New York Landmarks Conservancy in the past?

AD: When I established a consulting firm after working at the Landmarks Commission for a number of years, the Conservancy was among my very first clients. I did a few National Register nominations for them, and I did a series of walking tour guidebooks to Harlem, to Lower Manhattan, and to the Upper East Side for them as well. And I did a survey project for them, the outgrowth of which was their Sacred Sites program. I spent a summer surveying religious institutions in New York, Albany, Rochester, and Buffalo and assessing their problems in maintaining their historic buildings. But I haven’t actually worked for them for many years.

EK: So this award honors outstanding accomplishments in preservation. What would you say some of these accomplishments are that led you to receiving this honor?

AD: Oh, that’s a hard one to answer. I think in part it is the catalog of all the different projects that I’ve done and the advocacy work that I’ve done. I think there are certain things that stand out. Certainly my books about New York I think have aided in the understanding of different aspects of the architecture of New York and about neighborhood development and about change in the city’s architecture. The fact that I’m the co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project I think is really significant in that it tries to add another layer to our understanding of the history of New York and to recognize vernacular buildings where important things might have happened and that we might not have realized it just by looking at the building. So these efforts to add cultural significance to the architecture I think are really important. The National Register nominations and the Landmarks Commission designation reports that I’ve written and the advocacy work I’ve done with communities, I think all of these things combined are probably what led the Landmarks Conservancy to give me this award.

EK: As one of your past students and research assistants and someone who has consulted for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, I can definitively say that your accomplishments in cultural history and historic preservation have inspired my own work. What do you think the impact of your work is to the field of preservation at large and to your students past and present?

AD: I appreciate you saying what you just said. I hope that my work has inspired my students when they go out into the world. I think one of the most fulfilling things for me, being a teacher, is seeing how people change over the two years that I have taught them. When they come in, they’re very enthusiastic and often a little raw. And then seeing how people mature and then when you leave them to fledge out in the world and then to see what they accomplish, I think it’s really amazing. So that is among the most meaningful things personally for me in my career. I’ll bump into a former student at some point, whether it’s a preservation student or a New York Paris student or a student from something else, and they tell me twenty or twenty-five or thirty years after they took my course how meaningful it was and the difference that it made in their lives. Nothing is more moving to me than to hear that. It is so fulfilling for me to realize that I’ve really made a difference with people. What other reasons should there be to be teaching than to try to share your knowledge and make a difference for another group of people?

EK: Do you think your teaching achievements and experiences also contributed to you receiving this award?

AD: I certainly hope so. I think that’s an important part of who I am and what I’ve chosen to do with my career. When I started out in preservation by just the fact that I chose to leave a Ph.D. program to go to the preservation program and get a Master’s precluded in my mind the idea that I would ever be a university professor. But I traveled an unusual route and ended up a university professor, and it was a choice that I made. That’s what I wanted to do because it was the ability to share one’s knowledge and, at least I hope, my enthusiasm for architecture and preservation and cultural history. And I hope I’ve succeeded in doing that. And I think I have.

EK: I think you have, but I am biased. So can you talk a bit about some of your current projects that you are working on?

AD: I’m still working on the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. In fact, I just finished writing up an entry for choreographer Paul Taylor, and I’m writing up an entry for two progressive reformers, Frances Kellor and Mary Dreier, right now, so that’s a really important project that I’m working on. I am finishing up the editing of an essay that I’ve written for a book that the Morgan Library is about to publish to coincide with the restoration of the original library building. And most significantly, I’m very interested in New York’s vernacular architecture, the types of buildings that you pass every day and you don’t even notice, but they are what create the fabric of the city, so I’m working on a book on the architecture of garment lofts and the creation of the Garment District. I’m hoping to make a lot of progress on that this summer. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a long time, and it’s time to get it written.

EK: How are you planning on celebrating this win?

AD: I guess it’s a kind of win one celebrates quietly because in our COVID age there won’t be a live event and the party afterwards. I have to say I really regret that I won’t be winning this award in some great interior. These Lucy Moses Awards have been given in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Temple Emanu-El and St. Bartholomew’s, and all these people that I know and all my colleagues and students and former students are there, and it would be really thrilling, but this year I’m going to be celebrating quietly by watching it digitally.

EK: I know myself and some of your other students plan on being there as well.

AD: That’s great to hear. So I wish we could all be celebrating together.