Secretary of the Interior's Standards For Rehabilitation
The Landmarks Commission uses the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation to evaluate the appropriateness of changes to historic properties. The Standards were developed by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior to address rehabilitation issues in a format that allows for their application to a wide variety of building types and styles. Because this particular set of Standards addresses Rehabilitation (rather than the more stringent categories of Preservation or Restoration) they provide latitude for the replacement of extensively deteriorated, damaged or missing features using either traditional or substitute materials. Rehabilitation also provides an opportunity to make possible an efficient contemporary use of a property through alterations and additions.

The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation are as follows:

1. A property will be used as it was historically or be given a new use that requires minimal change to its distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships.
2. The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The removal of distinctive materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.
3. Each property will be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Changes that create a false sense of historical development, such as adding conjectural features or elements from other buildings, will not be undertaken.
4. Changes to a property that have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved.
5. Distinctive features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a historic property will be preserved.
6. Deteriorated historic features will be repaired rather than replaced. Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature will match the old in design, color, texture, and where possible, materials. Replacement of missing features will be substantiated by documentary and physical evidence.
7. Chemical or physical treatments, if appropriate, will be undertaken using the gentlest means possible. Treatments that cause damage to historic materials will not be used.
8. Archaeological resources will be protected and preserved in place. If such resources must be disturbed, mitigation measures will be undertaken.
9. New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction will not destroy historic materials, features, and spatial relationships that characterize the property. The new work will be differentiated from the old and will be compatible with the historic materials, features, size, scale and proportion, and massing to protect the historic integrity of the property and its environment.
10. New additions and adjacent or related new construction will be undertaken in such a manner that, if removed in the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property and its environment would be unimpaired.