World Monuments Fund Names 10 U.S. Heritage Sites for New Preservation Program
As the United States moves toward its 250th anniversary, the World Monuments Fund is turning attention to places that carry the country’s history in brick, adobe, stone, and landscape. The organization has selected ten heritage sites for Irreplaceable America, a new program that will provide each site with a year of consultation services and advocacy-focused support, with the possibility of a future preservation partnership.
The sites were chosen from 75 public nominations and span the full sweep of U.S. history, including places that predate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Among them are Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, the African Meeting House in Boston, the remains of the nation’s first smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the Wright Brothers’ workshops and surrounding fields in Dayton, Ohio, and the entire city of New Orleans.
Two of the oldest selections are San Estévan del Rey in Acoma Pueblo and San José de Laguna, 17th-century mission churches in New Mexico about an hour west of Albuquerque. WMF describes the pair as examples of a hybrid between Spanish colonial and traditional Pueblo architecture, and as physical evidence of “the complex and contested history of colonisation, evangelisation and Indigenous resilience in the American Southwest.” San Estévan del Rey is the oldest surviving European church in New Mexico, while San José de Laguna is known for its hand-painted interior, where Pueblo and Catholic symbols appear side by side. Both remain active Catholic churches and remain closely tied to local Pueblo communities, even as they face limited funding, depopulation, and the loss of adobe-construction skills needed for their care.
The list also reaches into art history. Watts Towers in Los Angeles, begun by Italian American outsider artist Simon Rodia in 1921, includes 17 towers, the tallest nearly 100 feet high, along with mosaic-covered labyrinths made from broken tile and found objects. On the other side of the country, Black Mountain College in North Carolina is represented by the Studies Building, which WMF identifies as the academic and social heart of the school’s legacy. Founded in 1933, the college counted Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Walter Gropius among its community. The Studies Building was designed by A. Lawrence Kocher and built in the early 1940s by the college community.
WMF says the selected sites face a range of threats, including earthquakes, climate change, water infiltration, deterioration, and dwindling financial resources. Bénédicte de Montlaur, the organization’s president and chief executive, said the program reflects what communities gain when they can protect places that matter — and what is lost when they cannot. As the semiquincentennial approaches, the initiative frames preservation not as nostalgia, but as a civic act tied to memory, education, and public life.
