Preserved

When the Barker Brothers furniture company decided to open a main branch in Long Beach, the company erected a solid, eight-story Art Deco hulk that was made to last. The 78-year-old building, a local historic landmark with understated accents of zigzags and octagons, sits empty now, boarded up, lifeless. The furniture store went out of business years ago. The downtown building, a relic from a golden age of prosperity and architecture in Long Beach, faces demolition.

The U.S. is beginning an interesting experiment in democracy: We're cutting public library funds, shrinking our public and school libraries, and in some places, shutting them altogether. These actions have nothing to do with whether the libraries are any good or whether the staff provides useful service to the community. This country's largest circulating library, in Queens, N.Y., was named the best system in the U.S. last year by Library Journal. Its budget is due to shrink by a third.

A plant that was frozen in Siberian permafrost for about 30,000 years has been revived by a team of Russian scientists - and borne fruit, to boot. Using tissue from immature fruits buried in fossil squirrel burrows some 90 feet below the surface, researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Pushchino managed to coax the frozen remains of a Silene stenophylla specimen into full flower, producing delicate white blooms and then fruit. The findings, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe what is a record for reviving presumably dead plant tissue - and may provide clues as to what makes some plants hardier and longer-lived than others.

A 14-year-old hamburger -- seemingly perfectly preserved, looking like it just hopped off the grill -- has left McDonald's with a lot of explaining to do. The fast-food chain says the apparent lack of mold or disintegration is actually no big deal, and suggests that the burger's pristine appearance -- assuming it's not a prank -- is likely the result of dehydration, and not funky preservatives. The hamburger has been in the headlines of late, most recently on "The Doctors.

While leaders of the Wildlands Project are making long-range plans to connect wilderness areas across the continent, a more modest--some would say more practical--effort is underway in the foothills of southwestern Riverside County. The project, believed to be the first of its kind in the state, would link the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve to the Cleveland National Forest, just 3.5 miles away.

For more than half a century, it was a musty pugilistic monument--preserved in liniment and sweat--where generations of Los Angeles prizefighters learned the lessons of "the sweet science." The Main Street Gym, on the edge of skid row, was the rattiest workout venue in the city (some said the world), but it also was the most famous. "World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily" read a sign at the entrance.

To visit the Fenyes Mansion is to step back into turn-of-the-century Southern California. Eva S. Fenyes, an arts patron and artist, commis sioned architect Robert Farquhar to build the Beaux-Arts-style estate on Orange Grove Boulevard in 1905. (The architect later became known for his 1927-28 design of Beverly Hills High School and his contributions to the Pentagon in Washington.

At the House That Wilt Built, the spirit of the outsized original owner still reverberates. Ten years after Wilt Chamberlain was found dead of heart failure in the upstairs bedroom, ownership of the hilltop hideaway in Bel-Air has changed hands twice, but the memory of the former Lakers center has been respectfully preserved even as much of the interior has been reconsidered and remodeled. Many of what Chamberlain once called his home's "kinky details" are gone, among them a mirrored ceiling in the master bedroom that retracted to reveal open sky and a Cleopatra-inspired sunken bathtub that sat at the foot of the bed. A downstairs "playroom," where Chamberlain had a wall-to-wall water bed floor, is just another room, sans water bed. And the moat swimming pool, though still accessible through an opening in the living room floor, has been divided into three smaller bodies, a lap pool built into the middle.

Irving Gill, San Diego's most significant modern architect, left a legacy of innovative buildings in San Diego and Los Angeles when he died in 1936. But while Gill's houses, apartments and public buildings in those two cities are his most famous, the last structures he designed are in Oceanside.