Dolores H. "Dilly" Schapiro

1930 - 2022

SCHAPIRO, Dolores H. "Dilly", 91, died Tuesday, May 10, 2022, in Richmond, Va., of a brief illness. Predeceased by her parents, Hyman and Mildred Hendel, Dilly – as she was known from childhood – was born in New York, N.Y., November 16, 1930. She grew up in Brooklyn, then synonymous with Entenmann's bakery, Nathan's hot dogs and the Dodgers, and Manhattan, whose landmarks for her – as her family's professional New Yorker - included Katz's Delicatessen, Ratner's and Broadway theaters.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, she worked for Bloomingdale's, the Manhattan department store, becoming a personnel manager at its first suburban branch in Hackensack, N.J. She was on the staff of the West Side Highway Project, an initiative in the 1970s to upgrade the high-speed road along Manhattan's Hudson River shoreline. She also worked for New York architectural firms. In later years, she managed commercial and industrial properties in Northern New Jersey developed by her father, who had also been a printing and packaging executive.

She was graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, one of the nation's oldest secondary schools, which also produced film and opera stars, famed authors and artists and football and basketball champions. She attended Brooklyn College for a year, transferring to Smith College, from which she was graduated in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in English. She earned a bachelor's degree in environmental design from the Parsons School of Design, an arm of the New School for Social Research, in 1973. She also attended the Columbia University School of Architecture.

She and her late former husband lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, moving in 1957 to Englewood Cliffs, N.J., a New York City suburb, where they raised their family. In 1973, she returned to New York, living in Manhattan until 2017. She then moved to the Westminster-Canterbury, a senior residence in Richmond, her home at the time of her death. It was there she dispensed one of her more memorable lines. Asked by fellow resident – a native Virginian – whether she played bridge, she replied, "No, but I did go to Smith College."

An arts enthusiast, she was a longtime patron of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. In Richmond, she subscribed to the Richmond Symphony and was a member of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

Widely traveled, she frequently visited France, in part, as a student of its language. She organized for many years French-only evenings at her art-lined, antique-filled apartment on the Upper East Side. In the 1960s, her interest in food led her to courses taught by such cooking pioneers as James Beard, Julia Child and Michael Field.

She is survived by a son, Jeff Schapiro (Clare) of Richmond; a daughter, Susan Pinto of Redding, Conn.; three grandchildren, Mariel Pinto of Portland, Ore., Jeremy Pinto of Norwood, N.J. and Felix Schapiro of Richmond; and two cousins she regarded as her sisters – the three having shared their youth along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn – Roslyn Gill of Washington, D.C., and Joan Suss of Baltimore, Md.

Funeral arrangements are private.