In a Historic Building, Your Feet Might as Well Be Jackhammers

Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura

Because of its age and fragile materials, the Tenement Museum works to balance visitorship with conservation needs.

Dave Favaloro, the director of curatorial affairs at the Tenement Museum in New York City, had just arrived home from a long day at work one evening in late May when his phone buzzed with an email.

A colleague was doing a final walkthrough of the museum’s renovated apartments at 97 Orchard Street, and sent Favaloro a question that hurled him into a slight panic. Had he noticed that a portion of the plaster ceiling had fallen to the floor?

He hadn’t, but it didn’t come as a total shock. The museum invites visitors to step inside the cramped quarters that immigrant families shared when they landed on Manhattan’s shores in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a fairly old building, and its condition was never great—small and sweltering rooms, with nary a window let alone a breeze, and nothing built to last. Keeping the apartments both historically accurate and safe amid a steady march of foot traffic is constant work.

The museum had known about vulnerable spots for a while. Like many historic properties, the institution has to strike a balance between attracting visitors and shoring up its defenses against them. It’s a problem so common that, on UNESCO’s list of potential threats to heritage sites, visitation sits alongside more obvious perils like pollution. Of course, a museum exists so that people can visit it—that’s the very essence of its museum-ness. But when guests step back in time, they’re treading on fragile ground.

The Tenement Museum’s interpreted rooms are crammed full of period-appropriate objects, all of which have to be removed and stored during construction.

To keep tabs on what’s going on, Favaloro and Danielle Swanson, the museum’s collections manager, do monthly conservation monitoring. Each room is scrutinized twice a year. In 2013, after noticing some ongoing damage to plaster on ceilings and walls, museum staff enlisted the services of structural engineers from Robert Silman Associates to install seismographs that capture vibration data. Over the course of four weeks, the instruments measured peak particle velocity (or PPV, a standard measure of vibration in inches per second), in 15-second intervals. This is a common approach: a number of art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, have monitored vibrations during construction projects or when installing something heavy and huge.

The Tenement Museum’s seismograph data revealed that things were pretty sleepy, vibration-wise, after hours. The engineers attributed the occasional out-of-nowhere late-night peak to garbage trucks or ambulances. During the day, though, the instruments recorded predictable patterns that seemed to map on pretty neatly to the schedule of guided tours. Between the hours of 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., whenever visitors climbed the stairs and stood or sat inside the historic apartments, the seismograph recorded frequent spikes up to roughly 0.3 inches/second. It seemed, the engineers wrote, that “the tour groups are ‘exciting’ the floors.’”