Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Ill., is on the list of endangered sites. Preservation Group Lists Most Endangered Places
When composing a list of the country’s buildings that are most worth saving, the hangar for the Enola Gay at Wendover Airfield in Utah might not come immediately to mind.
But when the National Trust for Historic Preservation assembles its annual roster of America’s most endangered historic places, it looks for more than aesthetic distinction. Each year the trust selects what it considers important examples of the nation’s architectural, cultural and natural heritage that are at risk of being destroyed or irreparably damaged.
So when the trust unveils its 2009 sites on Tuesday, the hangar will be among them. It housed the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb used in war, on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and is in critical disrepair. Other similarly less-than-glamorous locations on the list are Memorial Bridge, which for more than 85 years has connected the coastal towns of Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine, and is now in danger of removal, and the Human Services Center in Yankton, S.D. Founded in 1879 as the South Dakota Hospital for the Insane, the institution’s collection of neo-Classical, Art Deco and Italianate buildings have long stood vacant, and the state plans to tear down 11 of them.
“Buildings like that can be adaptively reused for new community purposes,” said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s a mistake to allow structures to fall into disrepair or to be demolished.”
The current economic downturn is a mixed blessing for endangered buildings, Mr. Moe said. Although more buildings are being neglected, fewer are threatened with demolition because development has slowed. In 22 years the trust has selected 211 sites worth saving and lost just 6 of them.
“It focuses not only local attention but national,” Mr. Moe said of the list, “and helps to mobilize both human and financial resources.”
The 2009 roster of buildings, 11 in all, includes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., a Cubist structure made of poured concrete that has been plagued by structural problems and a lack of money for restoration. Mount Taylor in New Mexico, another trust selection, is a sacred site for American Indian tribes whose cultural and archaeological resources are threatened by uranium mining.
This year the trust made a point of highlighting the threat to Modernist buildings. Thus the inclusion of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where the actress Diane Keaton, a trustee of the organization, is scheduled to announce the list on Tuesday. The Century, built in the mid-’60s and designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the architect of the World Trade Center — was also chosen to focus attention on sustainability and the need to recycle existing infrastructure. Development plans call for the hotel to be razed and replaced by two 600-foot-tall towers, one residential and one business.
Miami Marine Stadium in Virginia Key, Fla., which was completed in 1963, is another Modernist structure worthy of rescue, the trust asserts. With a cantilevered folded-plate roof, the cast-concrete stadium closed in 1992 after being damaged by Hurricane Andrew, and has since suffered from years of deterioration, vandalism and neglect.
“It’s a wonderful Modernist structure — one of a kind — that could be a catalyst for revitalizing that whole part of Miami if it were redone,” Mr. Moe said. “None of these things stand in isolation by themselves. They affect their context, they affect their surroundings.”
Rounding out the list are Ames Shovel Shops, an intact 19th-century industrial village in Easton, Mass.; the cast-iron architecture of Galveston, Tex., late-19th-century Greek Revival and Italianate buildings with ornate cast-iron storefronts; Dorchester Academy in Midway, Ga., founded in 1868 as a school for freed slaves; and Lanai City, Hawaii, built by the pineapple baron James Dole in the 1920s, which features plantation-style homes.
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