Historic Sites

There's a ghost in my wine. I haven't always believed in ghosts. That's a recent development. In the spring, my wife, Jenn, and I headed to the Napa Valley for a seance, of sorts -- an attempt to summon the spirits of winemaking past. I'm not talking about ghouls, goblins or apparitions in flowing gowns. I'm talking about the ghost wineries that dot the valleys, mountains and benchlands of America's most famous winemaking region. So what exactly is a ghost winery?

At Badaling, the Great Wall rides the ridgelines like a dragon, its gray brick scales glinting and its crenelated spine writhing. Built at a strategic pass in the mountains north of Beijing, it crosses stout gates, plunges into narrow defiles, climbs back up to the heights and seems to go on forever. Long after this month's Olympic Games end in Beijing, people will flock to Badaling, where seeing is believing in the Ten Thousand Li Long Wall of ancient annals and legend.

One of the few remaining "witness trees" to the Battle of Gettysburg has been felled by a storm, National Park Service officials said. It stood just 150 feet from the platform on which President Lincoln delivered his most famous speech. The huge honey locust tree on Cemetery Hill fell Thursday evening. The tree, which stood on the right side of the Union lines, "was there as a silent witness -- to the battle, to the aftermath, to the burials, to the dedication of the cemetery," park historian John Heiser said.

When the bulldozers come to Ft. MacArthur next spring, Joe Janesic will take it personally. For more than two decades, the 40-year-old has been a mainstay of the historic military site in San Pedro that was built in 1914 and served as an Army post until 1974. He organizes events, conducts tours, handles media and even restores vintage phones -- all as a volunteer. A founding member of the Ft. MacArthur Museum, he has dedicated his life to preserving every relic on the grounds.

The place called Lumpkin's Slave Jail was indeed a jail, but it was much more than that. It was a holding pen for human chattel. In Richmond's Shockoe Bottom river district, the notorious slave trader Robert Lumpkin ran the city's largest slave-holding facility in the 1840s and 1850s. Tens of thousands of blacks were held in the cramped brick building while they waited to be sold. Those who resisted were publicly whipped.

BEFORE the torrential rain and the ankle-deep mud, before the quarter-sized blister and the mouse-sized cockroach, before all that, I climbed a 2,000-year-old Maya pyramid, watched the red orb of the sun sink into the jungle canopy and felt the thrill of being an anachronism. Modern society has no claim on this place. In every direction, unbroken jungle spread in green waves. Monkeys crashed through the trees below. Dragonflies patrolled the pyramid's summit in jerky circles.

Will the Frappuccino be forbidden on imperial grounds? Government officials wouldn't say if the Starbucks baristas would be barred from Beijing's Forbidden City but acknowledged Thursday that they were weighing concerns of more than 500,000 Chinese who want the coffee chain kicked out. The announcement could be seen as a small boost for the petition drive started by Rui Chenggang, a popular Chinese TV personality.

It can be a curse, the neighbors discovered, to move onto the well-heeled, palm-festooned San Clemente lane next to Richard Nixon's former home. Christopher Arndt and Maureen Doyle despised what local historians describe as the former Western White House's security wall, which bisects their backyard. The couple whittled a door into the red-tile-capped barrier to reach the rest of their property. Their next-door neighbor, Richard Osman, loathed the wall too.

Those hunting for a way to restore a once-scenic canyon above Pasadena have turned to shotguns. Work crews will break up large boulders clogging parts of historic Rubio Canyon since a 1998 avalanche by drilling holes in them and firing off shotgun shells inside to blow them apart, the U.S. Forest Service says. After that, leftover chunks will be randomly distributed by hand throughout the canyon, which a century ago was one of Los Angeles' top tourist attractions.