National Trust for Historic Preservation: LA Port Plan Makes Terminal Island Preservation a Key Goal

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has issued the following press release about upcoming Terminal Island preservation efforts and its new LA field office.

The Los Angeles Port Master Plan Update, adopted by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners earlier this month, offers a path forward for the preservation and re-use of historic buildings on Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and Los Angeles Conservancy collaborated on an advocacy campaign to preserve Terminal Island, which appeared on the National Trust’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places List in 2012.

“Terminal Island represents important chapters of Los Angeles and America’s cultural, naval and economic history,” said Brian Turner, senior field officer, National Trust for Historic Preservation. “The re-use of historic buildings at the port will help keep alive the area’s historic significance as a once-vibrant Japanese-American fishing village, a major World War I and II shipbuilding center and the birthplace of the worldwide tuna canning industry.”

The National Trust and the Los Angeles Conservancy worked to ensure that the final master plan would not pose barriers to preservation and serves as a replicable model for other industrial ports throughout the country. Preservation-focused components of the plan include the identification of Fish Harbor’s Japanese-American Commercial Village as a historic resource, the removal of road realignments originally intended to bisect historic buildings and mixed-use land use designations that provide greater flexibility in adaptively reusing historic buildings. The approved plan is the first comprehensive update of the Port’s development policies and procedures in more than three decades.

“The LA Conservancy has been advocating for the preservation of individual historic buildings at the port for years, so we’re thrilled that the updated master plan provides for the reuse of historic structures on Terminal Island,” said Linda Dishman, Los Angeles Conservancy Executive Director. “Terminal Island is unique in that it is historically important for several different reasons, all of which are of local and national significance.”

On the heels of this preservation victory, the National Trust will open a field office in Los Angeles on September 1 to further its efforts to preserve historic places in Southern California and the Southwest. In addition to the National Trust’s work at Terminal Island, the organization’s Preservation Green Lab is collaborating with the Urban Land Institute to advance the reuse of historic buildings in the City of Los Angeles that will help guide building reuse in other cities.