The only two surviving buildings from Terminal Island’s days as a thriving Japanese American fishing village in the early 1900s have been placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2025 list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.
The designation, announced Wednesday morning, is meant to elevate the visibility of the site, which stands as a physical reminder of a story that ended with the incarceration of the island’s residents — among an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most American citizens, who were forcibly removed following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II.
Today, Terminal Island is part of one the country’s busiest container ports, and many people don’t know that it was the first place from which Japanese Americans were uprooted and sent to government camps such as Manzanar in the Owens Valley.
“It’s a story that hasn’t been really told,” said Los Angeles Conservancy President and Chief Executive Adrian Scott Fine, adding that his organization has been working to preserve Terminal Island’s structures for close to two decades. “And if you go there, you’re not going to know that unless you stumble across these two buildings and then learn the story, because everything, with the exception of these two buildings, has been cleared away.”
The village was home to more than 3,000 people living in small wooden cottages and bungalows. Tuna Street was the main business thoroughfare and home to the two remaining buildings: the dry goods store Nanka Shoten (1918) and the grocery A. Nakamura Co. (1923). The destruction of the village began immediately following its residents’ removal in 1942, and over the years more structures were razed as the island grew into an industrial and commercial port.
Historic sites on the annual National Trust list are chosen in part “based on the urgency of the threat, the viability of the proposed solution and the community engagement around the site,” said National Trust President and Chief Executive Carol Quillen.
A group of survivors and descendants of the Terminal Island community — the Terminal Islanders Assn., formed in the 1970s — has been crucial to preservation efforts and has partnered with the National Trust and the L.A. Conservancy to propose meaningful and practical preservation solutions. Fine said discussions have included turning the structures into stores selling food and other necessities to port workers, who have few options on the island.
“They were always community-serving, and that would continue the original function and use even today,” said Fine, while helping to tell the history.
The Tuna Street buildings are being considered for a historic-cultural monument designation with the city of L.A., a lengthy process that does not totally protect any site from destruction.
The Port of Los Angeles is reportedly considering demolishing the vacant and deteriorating buildings to make room for more container storage. Fine said the port has done a study that found the buildings to not be historic. But razing the buildings, he said, would contradict a master plan that the port hammered out with the L.A. Conservancy in 2013 after the entire island was placed on that year’s National Trust list of endangered places.
The report allows the port to conduct a streamlined environmental review leading to demolition, “which they’ve done for some of the other tuna canneries and structures that were there just in the last 10 years,” Fine said. “So in pattern and in practice, we believe that that’s very much how they’re approaching this one as well.”
The National Trust’s Quillen said the goal is to highlight “the contributions of these folks to our country’s history and economy, and the ways in which this community fought for the rights that we all subscribe to. So when I think about the promise of this country, the ideals that are expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, I want to honor the people whose lives and work exemplified the fight to realize those ideals.”
The other 10 sites on the 2025 National Trust list are:
- Cedar Key, Fla.
- French Broad and Swannanoa River corridors in western North Carolina
- Hotel Casa Blanca, Idlewild, Mich.
- May Hicks Curtis House, Flagstaff, Ariz.
- Mystery Castle, Phoenix
- The Chateau at Oregon Caves, Caves Junction, Ore.
- Pamunkey Indian Reservation, King William County, Va.
- San Juan Hotel, San Juan, Texas
- The Turtle, Niagara Falls, N.Y.
- The Wellington, Pine Hill, N.Y.
At noon Wednesday, the L.A. Conservancy will hold a virtual program about the history of Tuna Street and efforts to preserve it.
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