Historic Sites

TIME stands still at Oakridge. The stone house on the Northridge hilltop is locked. Through its darkened windows can be glimpsed empty rooms that for nearly a half-century echoed with the laughter of comic actor Jack Oakie and a nonstop flow of Hollywood buddies. Its curving driveway, circling an ancient oak, is cracked. The back lawn, where Oakie and his celebrity friends lazed away summer days by the pool, is overgrown and brown.

As a travel writer, I'm always looking for new tools I can use to help plan my trips. Lately, there's been lots of talk about a social media site called Pinterest, a free online photo bulletin board that's popular with designers, foodies and crafts people. But could you use it to plan trips? Well, yes. It turns out that the travel industry, as well as individual travelers, are starting to use this visual social platform with interesting results. The photos make it easy for a traveler to quickly scan a destination's food, architecture or historic sites.

Judy Forte plans to report to her government job Monday morning without a hint of complaint. She is 54 and superintendent of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. The King holiday is her Super Bowl. Thousands will make their way Monday to Auburn Avenue, just east of downtown Atlanta, to bear witness at King's outdoor crypt, and to tour his birth home. They will crowd into the civil rights history display underneath Forte's office, and the meticulously preserved old Ebenezer Baptist Church across the street, where King preached and plotted his nonviolent revolution.

Match the areas that have been restored to look the way they did many years ago with their descriptions below. 1. Re-creation of the Pilgrims' first settlement 2. Re-creation of a 19th century New England whaling village 3. Re-creation of a New England farming community of the 1830s 4. The restored 18th century capital of Virginia 5. More than 80 historic buildings and many objects on U.S. history in Michigan * a. Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Va. b.

After restoring a home on the site of the Carroll County, Md., birthplace of Francis Scott Key, millionaire history buff William F. Chaney is selling it. The property's connection to the writer of "The Star-Spangled Banner" captivated Chaney, who bought Terra Rubra -- the name means "Red Earth" -- for $1.3 million two years ago.

Two fires ravaged historic sites in the nation's capital, one gutting part of a 134-year-old market and the other destroying irreplaceable documents and art at the Georgetown public library branch. Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin said the fires were unrelated. The first blaze tore through the Eastern Market, a Capitol Hill landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city-owned building was empty at the time and there were no injuries, Rubin said.

For more than half a century Americans have celebrated the first week in February as Black History Week. The idea was conceived in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard-educated black scholar and author. In recent years the celebration of Black History Week has been extended to Black History Month. It is a time when schools, churches, civic organizations and individuals search for ways to acknowledge the accomplishments of Afro-Americans.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has signed a 25-year lease to take over a federal historic site where a group of Mormon pioneers are believed to have died in a snowstorm. The Mormon Church and the Bureau of Land Management signed papers in Cheyenne covering 930 acres of public land at Martin's Cove near Casper, culminating years of negotiations.

President Reagan signed Wednesday legislation creating a national historic site in former President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains, Ga. The law authorizes the National Park Service to spend up to $3.5 million to "preserve the key sites and structures associated with Jimmy Carter during his lifetime, to provide for the interpretation of his life and presidency and to present the history of a small Southern town."

Boeing Co. announced plans to close its long-standing facility in Wichita, Kan., where the company works on B-52 Stratofortress bombers and aerial refueling tankers. The company's historic facility in Wichita has played a large role in city's claim to be the Air Capital of the World. During World War II, the Boeing complex churned out B-29 Superfortress bombers and later the larger B-52s. More than 2,160 people are employed at the facility. Boeing said work will gradually be scaled down before it is officially closed by the end of next year.

For half a century, the sprawling 110-acre aerospace complex in Redondo Beach has played host to the development of the nation's most advanced and secret spacecraft. Known as Space Park, the site was built at the height of the Cold War after the launch of Sputnik for engineers to develop a high-powered rocket that could deliver a nuclear warhead 6,000 miles away in less than an hour to virtually wipe out an entire city: the intercontinental ballistic missile. The complex's 47 buildings have served as a nerve center for the development and construction of high-powered lasers, cutting-edge electronics and sophisticated spacecraft.

On a day when the price of gold soared above $1,700 an ounce, Jack Shipley drove past tourists strolling through this historic Eastern Sierra mining camp and up a rutted road to where a new breed of prospectors have set their sights. The Bodie Hills hug the California-Nevada line in Mono County -- thousands of acres of jagged volcanic summits, thick sagebrush, dry lakes and plunging canyons lined with aspens. The hills are a paradox: Empty and wild yet shot through with hundreds of untapped mining claims dating to the 19th century.

Cesar E. Chavez's California retreat has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the designation of the site in the Tehachapi Mountains where the labor leader lived and led the farmworkers movement the last 22 years of his life. Salazar, who called Chavez "one of the heroes of the 20th century," made the announcement at a gathering of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington on Wednesday night. The 187-acre Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz in Keene, southeast of Bakersfield, served as headquarters of the United Farm Workers union and Chavez's residence from 1971 to 1993.

Although the Civil War was waged across the country — from Arizona to Maine — some of the heaviest and most decisive fighting took place in the beautiful rolling countryside of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Piedmont, as it's called, stretching from the eastern flank of the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic seaboard, is dotted with historic sites, and U.S15 runs right through the thick of it.. Now, a 180-mile stretch of the old highway from Charlottesville, Va., to Gettysburg, Pa., has a new name: the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Scenic Byway, a designation granted in 2009 to recognize the historic richness of a region encompassing 13 national park units and the homes of nine U.S. presidents, along with a panoply of Civil War sites such as Manassas, Brandy Station and Ball's Bluff in Virginia, Antietam and Monocacy in Maryland and Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia but then was part of Virginia.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina dreamed for years of putting a cultural center and museum on the historic old plaza near Olvera Street downtown. If only she and the rest of the project's planners had taken as long to research the site. Last year, as the work got under way, a crew disturbed the eternal sleep of those buried in L.A.'s first Roman Catholic cemetery. In all, some 118 remains were dug up and carted away before community protests brought the digging to a halt in January.

The House on Monday approved legislation to create a national historic site within a 650-acre preservation district in former President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains, Ga. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Richard Ray (D-Ga.), was passed by a voice vote and sent to the Senate, where a similar bill died last year because there was not enough time for a hearing.

Fifty years ago, amid wartime paranoia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order that transformed 500 desolate acres in eastern California into an internment camp, ringed by barbed wire and occupied by Japanese-Americans who were feared as possible traitors. Marking the anniversary Wednesday, the House voted 400 to 13 to approve a bill designating the Manzanar camp in the Owens Valley as a national historic site, clearing the way for possible reconstruction of the camp's buildings.

From a distance, the Watts Towers rise like tall cyclones of steel and concrete ? the highest nearly 100 feet ? spiraling toward the sky, standing guard over the Lilliputian bungalows lining East 107th Street. Up close the towers are a fantastical playground of archways and steps, inlaid with shards of pottery, glass and shells, their glistening gem-like surfaces begging to be touched ? something tour guides admonish visitors not to do. It took the eccentric tilemaker Simon Rodia 34 years to build the towers, finishing them in 1955 and then leaving Watts, never to return.

The Colburn Chamber Players ? Jim Walker (flute), JoAnn Turovsky (harp), John Perry (piano) and Paul Coletti (viola) ? acclaimed musicians and faculty members from the downtown conservatory, will play under the earthquake-defying Tiffany dome of gold-favrile glass in the Pompeian Room, situated within one of Los Angeles' great architectural gems, Hunt and Eisen's 1899 Doheny Mansion, for the latest installment of "Chamber Music in Historic Sites....