Facade Grant Program
2007 DESIGN CHALLENGE GRANT
The below information is provided as advice regarding the historic nature of Pottstown. Historic Preservation is one of the goals of PDIDA, however, as you will read below the definition of this acknowledges the need to make changes to buildings.
The Secretary of the Interior's Standards
ROOTED IN OVER 120 YEARS OF PRESERVATION ETHICS in both Europe and America, The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties are common sense principles in non-technical language. They were developed to help protect our nation's irreplaceable cultural resources by promoting consistent preservation practices.
The Standards may be applied to all properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places: buildings, sites, structures, objects, and districts.
The Standards are a series of concepts about maintaining, repairing and replacing historic materials, as well as designing new additions or making alterations; as such, they cannot, in and of themselves, be used to make essential decisions about which features of a historic property should be saved and which might be changed. But once an appropriate treatment is selected, the Standards provide philosophical consistency to the work.
There are Standards for four distinct, but interrelated, approaches to the treatment of historic properties--preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction.
Preservation focuses on the maintenance and repair of existing historic materials and retention of a property's form as it has evolved over time. (Protection and Stabilization have now been consolidated under this treatment.)
Rehabilitation acknowledges the need to alter or add to a historic property to meet continuing or changing uses while retaining the property's historic character.
Restoration depicts a property at a particular period of time in its history, while removing evidence of other periods.
Reconstruction re-creates vanished or non-surviving portions of a property for interpretive purposes.
For more details and to download the entire “standards” document visit: