A mule barn, a powerhouse and World War II-era barracks are among the structures at risk of collapse at Angel Island Immigration Station. On Wednesday, the site in the Bay was named on the annual listing of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places by a national nonprofit.
The list was compiled by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit chartered by Congress in 1949 to help communities maintain and enhance the narrative power of historic places.
The 11 sites on the list all receive a one-time grant of $25,000 from the trust. The grant and visibility are intended to jump-start local campaigns to restore the sites.
According to Edward Tepporn, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, the grant will be used for a campaign to help renovate the site’s outdoor terraces. He said the foundation has made progress on preserving the barracks and a hospital building.
“Significant resources are still needed to ensure that other structures on the site remain standing and to encourage more people to visit the site,” Tepporn said. “For those who do, it is a place where they have the opportunity to not only learn about this important-to-remember history, but also to feel the range of emotions connected to it.”
According to the California State Parks Foundation, the island’s immigration station served as the primary immigration processing and detention center on the West Coast from 1910 to 1940. Approximately 300,000 immigrants were processed there.
Unlike Ellis Island on the East Coast, the station at Angel Island was not built to welcome newcomers. It was built to interrogate, detain and often exclude them, especially under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first U.S. immigration law to target an entire ethnic group.
Non-Chinese immigrants typically were held for two to three days, while Chinese immigrants often stayed weeks, months or even years. In 1940, the site was used to detain 700 civilians of Japanese heritage living in Hawaii and California and served as a prisoner-of-war processing facility during World War II, temporarily detaining hundreds of Japanese, German and Italian prisoners of war.
A journey to the hilltop site includes sweeping views of Tiburon, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and Red Rock Island. Visitors can ride a tram up to the station site for a $12 fee.
This is the second time the site has made the endangered list. After it was included on the list in 1999, Angel Island State Park and the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation partnered to restore the detention barracks and hospital building and opened new areas to the public. Today, there is a permanent exhibit that connects the island’s history to modern-day detention and immigration.
Other sites on the list include a hotel in Montgomery, Alabama, where Black Americans lived under restrictive Jim Crow laws; the oldest surviving Quaker meeting house in Massachusetts; a women’s rights national park in Seneca Falls, New York, and the ancestral Pueblo and Hopi cultural landscapes in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah that are at risk from oil and gas development.
“Even as the American people prepare to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary, consequential historic places are at risk, some through intentional erasure, others from short-sighted development plans and still others from deterioration or neglect,” said trust president and CEO Carol Quillen in a statement.
According to the trust, recent federal actions have been aimed at erasing or rewriting some of the endangered sites on the list. In New York City, President Donald Trump’s administration attempted to edit the website and remove the rainbow Pride flag from the site of the Stonewall uprising, where a series of violent demonstrations against a police raid in 1969 marked a major turning point in modern LGBTQ+ civil rights.
In Pennsylvania, the site where the nation’s first presidents, George Washington and John Adams, lived has been targeted by federal actions to remove public interpretative materials about the people enslaved there and their efforts toward self-emancipation.
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