From a Montgomery hotel where Billie Holiday performed to a San Francisco Bay island where thousands of Asian immigrants were detained for months, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2026 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places is a map of the country’s most powerful, and most at-risk, stories.
Now in its 39th year, the privately funded nonprofit group’s annual list has spotlighted more than 350 sites since 1988, with only a handful lost. This year’s edition carries extra weight, dropping during America’s 250th anniversary and focusing on places tied to the ongoing fight for equality. Each site on the 2026 list also receives a one-time $25,000 grant.
The Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery, Ala., was a Black-owned sanctuary during Jim Crow, listed in the Green Book and host to B.B. King, Little Richard, and Tina Turner in its rooftop Afro Club. Today it sits vacant and deteriorating, steps from key Civil Rights landmarks. The Conservation Fund acquired it in 2025 to prevent demolition, but full rehabilitation will require major investment.
In Modoc County, Calif., the Tule Lake Segregation Center held over 126,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens. A proposed security fence around an airfield at the heart of the site threatens its sacred ground, where 331 people died. The Tule Lake Committee has generated over 38,000 public comments opposing the fence.
Also in California, Angel Island Immigration Station in Tiburon processed roughly one million people between 1910 and 1940, detaining over 300,000 primarily from Asia. Poems carved into the detention barracks walls helped save the buildings from demolition in the 1970s. The site still needs ongoing investment to remain accessible and welcoming.
In Detroit, Mich., burst pipes in 2024 shuttered the Detroit Association of Women’s Clubs clubhouse, a building secured in 1941 by Civil Rights leader Dr. Rosa Slade-Gragg against significant racial opposition. The building remains closed while repair funding is sought.
In New Mexico and beyond, the Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape, an ancestral homeland of Pueblo and Hopi nations, faces the potential rollback of protections against oil and gas development following a 2025 federal move to revoke a key leasing ban.
Other sites on the list include the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., facing over $10 million in deferred maintenance; the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, where interpretive materials about transgender history remain missing; the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where exhibits honoring nine enslaved people were removed; the Hanging Rock Revolutionary War Battlefield in South Carolina; El Corazon Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesus in Ruidosa, Texas, an adobe church built by Mexican American immigrants in 1915 that now sits feet from a proposed border wall; and the Swansea Friends Meeting House in Somerset, Mass., the oldest surviving Quaker meeting house in the state.
These places preserve the past and make the argument — in brick and adobe and carved poetry — that America’s story belongs to everyone.
