A father, a son, and one office on West 86th Street.

How the practice came to be what it is

Dr. Steven Berkowitz trained at Georgetown, completed a hospital residency at the Dayton Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and opened a practice on the Upper West Side. He has been at 40 West 86th Street ever since — long enough that he now treats the grandchildren of patients he saw in his first years.

His approach has not changed in that time, and it is not complicated. Solve the problem in the most conservative way possible. Explain what you are doing and why. Never propose treatment somebody does not need. It is an unfashionable way to build a practice and it works, which is why most of our new patients still arrive because somebody they know sent them.

Jonathan grew up in Queens and on Long Island. He went to Wisconsin, then dental school at Pittsburgh, then a hospital residency in Montrose, and then three more years at the University of Michigan for a prosthodontic residency — the specialty devoted to replacing and rebuilding teeth. In his final year he was Chief Resident and taught at the Michigan dental school.

He then spent ten years as the attending prosthodontist at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center, running the prosthodontic service and training residents of his own. That is a decade of the cases nobody else wanted — complex medical histories, extensive tooth loss, work that had already failed once elsewhere — while teaching younger dentists how to think their way through them.

He has now joined his father in practice. Which means a patient who has been coming here for twenty years for cleanings has access to a specialist in the next room for the kind of complex work that used to require a referral across town to somebody they had never met.