Charles Lockwood ’70

Charlie died of cancer March 29, 2012, at his home in Topanga, Calif.

Born in Washington, D.C., Charlie majored in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Charlie made his living as a writer specializing in writing about architecture. He did his senior thesis on brownstones in New York after he had looked for a book about brownstones and found that none had been published. Buoyed, he said, by “youthful enthusiasm and more than a little naivety,” Charlie completed Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783-1929. His book presaged the revival movement that has preserved brownstones in New York, and with them, much of the architectural and urban history in those buildings.

On March 6, 1970, Charlie and his photographer, Robert Mayer, were photographing brownstones in New York when suddenly one of the houses at the end of the street exploded. They shot a roll of film and took it to The New York Times. The house had been a bomb factory for the Weather Underground, and Charlie and Bob’s photograph appeared the next day on the front page of The New York Times.

To his mother, Allison; his brother, John; and his husband, Carlos Boyd, the class extends its deepest sympathy.