Collections Stewardship

Not-So-Good Vibrations: When Visitors Lead to Deterioration of Historic Buildings

Permalink: https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AAMers/fsPopup.asp?mode=presInfo&PresentationID=490127

At the heart of New York City's Tenement Museum is an apartment building built in 1863. Though it housed thousands of new arrivals to this country over the course of seventy years, it wasn’t designed to accommodate the over 250,000 visitors that the museum now sees annually. This session will reveal how visitors are often unintentionally the main culprits behind deterioration of a building's historic surfaces. Explore ways to plan preservation projects and react to emergency conservation needs while limiting disruption to daily activities.

Learning Objectives:

• Assess how the cumulative presence of visitors to historic buildings, over long periods of time and increased numbers, contributes to the deterioration of original structures and surfaces.
• Examine common preservation condition findings, and develop proactive and emergency responses to deterioration.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of potential preservation treatments according to the mission and goals of a museum/institution, in addition to considering the limitations of operating hours, resources/budget, and staff availability. Analyze how to manage similar projects and how and when to communicate about them.

Presenter(s)

• 

  Danielle Swanson

  Collections Manager
  Tenement Museum