The politics of preservation and heritage construction at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Abstract eng:
This paper explores the interrelated issues that inform the ongoing process of historic preservation and heritage management at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. A recently installed Preservation Advisory Committee has been charged with the task of evaluating both the Museum’s Preservation Philosophy and the 1863 building’s state of disrepair. Guided by their findings, the Museum staff must reconcile the claims of its institutional mission and the physical intervention necessary to conserve the structure while it remains open to the public. From interviews with the Museum’s staff, the Preservation Advisory Committee, and conservators, and through documentation of the technical processes and philosophical considerations of the building’s preservation, this ethnographic study investigates the questions and compromises that arise in the conservation of an historic structure-turnedmuseum.

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