The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s new list of the most endangered places looks back at 30 years of going to bat for buildings ...
Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation released its marquee list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.” This is the 30th anniversary of the annual list, so the Trust added an appropriately history-minded twist: They dug back into three decades of these lists—more than 270 places—to highlight some of the best successes.
The full list boasts some classic once-endangered places, like the Lewis and Clark campsite at Travelers’ Rest in Montana and Nine Mile Canyon in Utah, a Native American site that practically doubles as an outdoor art gallery. And there’s Antietam, the Civil War battlefield that successfully fought off an invasion by a shopping mall in 1988. (Disclosure: My fallback job is working at my family’s Civil War antique store in nearby Gettysburg, so my very-biased opinion is that Antietam is only the second-greatest United States Civil War battlefield.)
All this is very cool, but for our purposes we’ll focus on preservation wins that survived urban renewal: Here’s a murderer’s row of city sites, and the battles that saved them.1
Governors Island – New York City
from the 1998 Most Endangered List
Cathedral of St. Vibiana – Los Angeles
from the 1997 Most Endangered List
Historic Theaters – Boston
from the 1997 Most Endangered List
Little Rock Central High School – Little Rock, Arkansas
from the 1996 Most Endangered List
Statler Hilton Hotel – Dallas, Texas
from the 2008 Most Endangered List
President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home – Washington, D.C.
from the 2000 Most Endangered List
- 1. We only dug into the anniversary list, but the National Trust for Historic Preservation has a huge list of previously endangered urban spaces.