The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
Andrew Dolkart Book Talk
Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks
From irrefutable icons to lesser-known structures, much of what makes New York City unique owes its continuing existence to the NYC Landmarks Law. Born out of the destruction of McKim, Mead & White’s monumental Pennsylvania Station, the legislation established the parameters for protecting the places that represent our rich cultural, social, political, and architectural history. Saving Place is a collection of essays on the history and significance of the law that today protects more than 31,000 properties. In his talk, historian Andrew Dolkart will review the ideas of his essay and look in depth at the proposals for skyscrapers atop Grand Central Terminal that both threatened the station and law suits that strengthen the original Landmarks Law.
Andrew S. Dolkart is the Director of the Historic Preservation Program and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is the author of numerous books on the architecture and urban development of New York City, focusing in particular on the city's everyday, vernacular building types, including Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development, 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.
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The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by
public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
