Have you ever heard of the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati? Built in 1948 by the then emerging architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it was America’s first hotel in the postwar era. Its sky lobby—a revolutionary idea—sat on the eighth floor, above a department store. It was the first hotel to have elevators without operators in them, the first to have rooms with individual temperature controls, and it even had sofas that would convert to beds at the push of a button.

“It introduced modernism to the country, both in terms of modern architecture because it was the first major International Style hotel, and because it introduced modern art to the public,” Paul Muller, executive director of the Cincinnati Preservation Association, told AD . The interiors featured Joan Miró’s first commission in the U.S., as well as works by Alexander Calder, Saul Steinberg, and Jim Davis. And if that isn’t significant enough, it also represents an important—and underrecognized—contribution by Natalie DeBlois, lead designer at SOM at a time when there were very few female architects working at that level.

Unfortunately, today the Terrace Plaza Hotel is all but abandoned and deteriorating. There are a couple of stalwarts left in the street-level retail spaces, but in 2019 the city of Cincinnati filed a public nuisance complaint against the building’s current owners after finding vacant portions of the hotel open and unsecured. In 2018, a chunk of plaster fell off the hotel, damaging a passing car with two adults and a child inside. The building is included on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2020 .

The National Trust has been publishing this list annually for the past 33 years in an effort to draw attention to the historic sites most desperately in need of support. Of the more than 300 places featured over the years, around 95% have been saved.

“It really was about doing something that would draw attention to the idea that our cultural heritage was under threat around the country,” Katherine Malone-France, the National Trust’s Chief Preservation Officer, told AD about the initial impetus for the list. “There were all these places that were threatened and that were tremendously important. You might not know about them outside of your local community, but once you know about them you would care about them because they’re all part of our shared American story.”

Though the National Trust doesn’t do any kind of fundraising for the places featured on the list, the attention it brings is often enough to give the local preservation organizations working to protect these places the boost they need. For example, the Excelsior Club in Charlotte, North Carolina—a Black social club established in 1944 with a demolition permit filed against it—found a new buyer after appearing on the 2019 11 Most Endangered list and is currently being renovated and redeveloped. The Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses in Bridgeport, Connecticut—the last surviving traces of the Little Liberia community of free Blacks—received grants from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund after being named to the list in 2018.

The 2020 list spans the country from Alaska to Puerto Rico and includes archeological sites, residences, hotels, a hospital, a church, and a historic mineral water health resort. It includes the midcentury Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, which was once the meeting place for a women-led Civil Rights activism group; the headquarters of the nation’s first Black opera company in Pittsburgh; the historic capital of the Monacan Indian Nation in Columbia, Virginia; the Ponce Historic Zone in Puerto Rico, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Maria; the Chicago church where Mamie Till insisted on an open casket funeral for her 14-year-old son Emmett Till, whose murder helped catalyze the civil rights movement; and the Yates Memorial Hospital in Ketchikan, Alaska, just to name a few. These significant historic sites are suffering from neglect, damaged by natural disasters, abandoned, or even slated for demolition.

“We take the need for diversity in the list very seriously in a number of different ways, whether it’s geography or the stories represented or even the types of places,” France-Malone said. “One of the things I think is so important about the list is it really does represent the richness of historic places in this country and the diversity of stories that they tell in such powerful ways.”

Each site has different needs, ranging from funding for repairs to protection by the local government. Paul Muller of the Cincinnati Preservation Association is hoping that the Terrace Plaza Hotel’s inclusion on the list will convince the city of Cincinnati to adopt a preservation-based redevelopment strategy rather than allowing a new buyer to strip the building of its character. For now, any possible redevelopment is on pause due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Muller remains hopeful that the local landmark designation will move forward.

Want to support the Terrace Plaza Hotel and other endangered places? Go to the National Trust’s website , which has links to petitions you can sign or letters you can send to local elected officials in order to support these historic sites.