Designed by American landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg and completed in 1975, Peavey Plaza gets credited for reviving downtown Minneapolis and was apparently once called a "marvel of modernism" by the Cultural Landscape Foundation. In 2012, the city council voted to demolish the work, but since then preservationists managed to convince the powers-that-be that money should be spent to rehabilitate the plaza, not replace it. [Photo by Keri Pickett via The Cultural Landscape Foundation]

This 104-year-old former warehouse in Spokane, Wash., has been derelict for a decade, ever since its neighbor, Washington State University, bought the place in 2004. WSU tried to convert the building into housing and commercial units, but without success, they considered selling it to a Texas developer, who wanted to tear the Jensen-Byrd Warehouse down. Preservationists rallied to get WSU to again consider reviving it. The plan now is for it to become a "gateway" building in between teh campus and University District. [Photo by PreserveWA/Flickr]

Earlier this month Virginia's governor green-lighted a plan to restore and revitalize the state's historic Fort Monroe, which hasn't been a proper military base since 2005, though the Army only moved out in 2011.

In August, the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners unanimously approved a plan to preserve the city's Terminal Island, a smidge of land most famously known to once be the home of 3,500 first- and second-generation Japanese people in the years leading up to WWII. In 1942, the neighborhood became the first in the country to be evacuated en masse after the signing of the executive order that interned Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. It's also credited as "the location where America's tuna canning industry came of age," per the National Trust.

Home to the Chicago Cubs since 1916, Wrigley Field is also America's second-oldest baseball venue behind Boston's Fenway Park. Developers were considering demolishing the park, but after preservationists and Cubs purists went up in arms, the Cubs decided instead to renovate the place with the help of preservation architect T. Gunny Harboe, using city tax credits to restore the ballpark's historic character.

In March, President Obama designated five new national monuments, each representing "a diverse chapter in American history." The First State National Monument, one of the two built structures on Obama's list, is the only Delaware project in the National Park System. It includes 1,000 acres of parkland outside of WIlmington, "The Green" in the center of historic Dover, and the New Castle Courthouse Complex (pictured).

NOLA's 1927 Saenger Theatre and movie house has an interior that looks like a 15th-century Italian courtyard, with a ceiling painted like a night sky and faux stone structures flanking the seats. Per the National Trust, the theater "symbolized New Orleans', and America's, last flush of prosperity before the Great Depression." After it got converted to a performing arts space in 1970, the space played host to Johnny Carson, David Bowie, and Bill Cosby. Hurricane Katrina damaged it considerably (the basement was filled with more than 20 feet of water), but after eight years, the venue opened its doors again in October.

Chicago's Old Prentice Women's Hospital, a 1975 work by Bertrand Goldberg, had its first few floors knocked out in October, as the demolition devised by Northwestern University and executed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel got off to a start—despite months of substantial public outcry against the demolition (even Frank Gehrychimed in). The architectural historian Michael R. Allen, writing for Next City, wondered if Chicago didn't experience a present-day "Penn Station Moment,"—basically the loss of a landmark that will rally people to the defense of endangered structures for years to come. As for what's to come here, it was just announced that Perkins+Will will design the Prentice replacement: a 600-square-foot, glassy biomedical research building.

Early this year, it came time to say final goodbyes to the Richard Neutra-designed Gettysburg Cyclorama building, the 1962 work that had been embroiled in a messy preservationist battle for 13 years. Civil War purists—who thought the design a blemish in the otherwise rather untouched landscape of Gettysburg, Pa.—ultimately beat out their 20th-century preservationist brethren, who at one point brought the starchitect's son Dion Neutra into the fray. Unlike the Kronish House, the famed modernist's SoCal design that was recently saved from the wrecking ball, Neutra's Cyclorama is plunked right atop historic, government-owned land, making it impossible for an anonymous, wealthy superhero to step in—just as one did a Frank Lloyd Wright commission in Phoenix last year. Prior to 2008, the structure—considered by some to be Neutra's crown jewel—housed the 377-foot-long "Battle of Gettysburg" painting, completed by French artist Paul Philippoteaux in 1883, but the work was ultimately transplanted to a visitors' center.

The South's very first racially integrated library, Charleston County Library on King Street, got its demolition papers in August. The National Trust says the building's contemporary design was meant to "signal openness and a break from racially charged traditional architecture of the past."

After 20 years of vacancy and a epoch-long preservation tangle, San Francisco's Pagoda Palace Theater was finally demolished this year. When it was built in 1907, the Pagoda was a vaudeville theater; it became a movie "palace" in the '20s. The newest owners plan to build (surprise!) condos on the site, with an exterior that will be "a replica of the original Pagoda." Sigh.

In August, JFK airport's Pan Am Worldport, the 1960 terminal that was an icon for techno-modernism and symbol of the Jet Age, began its long-awaited dismemberment. The "sometimes-iconic, sometimes-maligned" terminal, as Architizer once described it, closed officially on May 24, exactly 53 years after it opened. Per Gizmodo, American corporations oft featured the Worldport's 114-foot pizza-pan roof (part UFO, part brutalist cocktail umbrella, and all 1960s glamour) in ads of the Mad Men era. In June, the National Trust for Historic Preservation attempted to raise awareness about the impending doom of the building, but without any regulatory teeth to halt the Worldport's destruction, their efforts were fruitless. Workers began removing asbestos and lead paint earlier in the summer, and some say the Jetsons-style structure may not be completely dismantled until 2015.

According to the National Trust, the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church was on the path toward destruction ever since the diocese halted service in 2000. It was the first Croatian Parish in the Western Hemisphere.