Title: Interpreting Historical Experience as a Prelude to Preservation
Description: People interact with and come to understand a place through experiencing it. The physical fabric and the experience contained in it are interdependent in creating meanings of a place. Preservationists often analyze meanings and significance of a historic site by its physical fabric alone when the ephemeral place-based experience contains historic meanings as rich and as important in understanding a historic site and its meanings to people in the past. The establishment of an analytical framework specifically for historic experience analysis, and its application to three New York City department store case studies explore the feasibility of analyzing historic experiences associated with the built fabric and advocates for considering historic place-based experience analysis as a prelude to making holistic preservation decisions.