It was May 6, 1921.

"He was keenly interested in astrophysics," says Richard Dreiser. "He had just won the Nobel Prize, and it's said he wanted to visit two places: Niagara Falls, and Yerkes Observatory. He undoubtedly spoke here, because there were students here then."

Today, the Falls thunder on, but the observatory's future is uncertain--and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why.

It was learned in July 2004 that the University of Chicago, which owns it, had received an offer from a New York developer to buy the property for a reported $10 million and build houses on its 77 acres. Local residents responded with a counteroffer that would preserve the building and its contents, and save the rest of the land as a park.

And so it stands.

"We know no more today than we did a year ago," says Dreiser, 54, public information officer and instructor at Yerkes, where he has worked in various capacities for 25 years.

"There are a lot of people interested. The University of Chicago hasn't made a decision. Every day they don't make a decision, it's better for us as we try to figure out what to do."

When the University of Chicago opened Yerkes for business in 1897, its 40-inch refractor telescope was the largest of its type the world had ever seen.

It still is. It's also obsolete.

"What we are doing up here now is mostly educational outreach," Kyle Cudworth, the observatory's only full-time astronomer, said earlier this year. "Yerkes doesn't fit very well into the university's [research] mission."

But it seems to fit very well into Williams Bay. Aside from its beach and marinas on Geneva Lake, Yerkes is the town's one true tourist attraction, drawing families and school groups for its three weekly tours (Saturdays at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and noon; free).

The building itself is a wonder, resembling an Italian palazzo that just happens to have three domes designed for telescopes. The architectural details, a mix of shapes and symbols, are at once ornate and baffling.

"We only wish the architect had not requested his papers be burned when he died," says Dreiser. "We've pretty much figured out what nearly everything means."

Nearly everything. There is, for one, this turtle sticking its nose up.

"We honestly don't know what it means."

It was at Yerkes, just before its official dedication, that astronomer George Ellery Hale discovered with the big telescope the presence of carbon in the solar atmosphere, and the discoveries kept on coming. Most are, frankly, esoteric: studies of the movements and life-cycles of stars, measurements and analyses of objects and atmospheres.

But its power as a symbol, then and today, is unmistakable.

"The people who have gone through these doors reads like a who's who of famous astronomers," Dreiser says. "Gerard Kuiper. Georges Van Biesbroeck. Carl Sagan. The Hubble Space Telescope was named for Edwin Hubble, who graduated from here in 1917.

"We're not getting enough education. We're not getting enough science. It's starting to get a little bit embarrassing."

For now, the educating continues. Along with the Saturday tours, there are star-gazing sessions on summer nights that use hand-held devices and the observatory's 24-inch telescope, which, unlike the big one ("It's not tracking well," Dreiser says), works just fine. But the future of the outreach programs is as unknown as much of the universe.

"Even if we were a national landmark [a designation the university has resisted] and nobody could touch us, we'd still need funding to continue," Dreiser says. "About $300,000 a year. I'm ready to go to Oprah and say, 'Oprah, please . . .'

"We'd like to stick around."
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