Doctor practices vocational rehab.

• Position: People - Brief Article

Andrew Rothschild is a physician, so it makes sense that, since moving to Raleigh two years ago, he has cared for the old and run-down. Only they haven't been people. He rehabilitates old buildings.

His first project here was the Clark & Sorrell Building, a Durham car-repair garage dating from the early 1930s. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it opened in January as the Triangle Biotechnology Center, offering incubator space. Rothschild's Raleigh-based company, Scientific Properties LLC, is renovating two other Durham buildings, the 95-year-old Venable Tobacco warehouse and an 89-year-old office building.

A New York City native, Rothschild, 31, returned there after attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania for an internal-medicine residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He started teaching at Long Island College Hospital in 1999. While still in training, he did his first restoration, an art-deco apartment building on New York's Upper West Side. He financed that with savings, in partnership with his brother, a restaurateur. Next came a four-story brownstone in the trendy Fort Green neighborhood of Brooklyn. "I was doing it as a hobby and found myself bitten by the bug," he says.

His wife's family operates Blue-stone Builders in Raleigh, so a move to North Carolina and real estate made sense -- to Rothschild, if not his friends. "They thought I was out of my mind. People don't understand why you'd spend...