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No matter that Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, is 206 years old. Until now, it had been in a perfectly contemporary Manhattan real estate bind: not enough space.

What to do? Move, of course.

So on Saturday, the two-story, 298-ton wood-frame house will be rolled conspicuously — and slowly — from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street. That is as close as it can get these days to the rural setting for which it was originally designed.

Once new foundations are completed, a yearlong, $8.4 million restoration and reconstruction will undo decades of unsympathetic alterations to the house, known formally as the Hamilton Grange National Memorial.

Stephen Spaulding, chief of the architectural preservation division in the National Park Service’s Northeast region, said the 500-foot move on Saturday should take three to six hours.

But in a sense, the journey has taken almost half a century. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy authorized the Interior Department to assume ownership of the house on the condition that it be moved to a suitable location.

As redevelopment sagas go, the story of the Grange ranks among the most protracted. For want of money and almost any concerted political will to get the deed done, at least until recent years, the Grange languished in near-obscurity as other historical landmarks gained a higher profile.

Visitors have found the Grange jammed between a six-story apartment house and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, its formal front facade abutting the church and all but invisible. Nor is this even its original location. Until 1889, when it was moved for the first time, the house was on 143rd Street, west of Convent Avenue.

Lost in the intervening years was any public sense that the founding father on the $10 bill, the nation’s first treasury secretary, had lived in Harlem; that a creator of the federal government passed his last two years in a refined country estate designed by John McComb Jr., an architect of City Hall, from which he departed in 1804 for the duel with Aaron Burr that cost him his life.

Now, in the house he left behind, Hamilton is again coming to life. To their joy, National Park Service officials have discovered that the front stairway, though much modified over time, is essentially the one built for Hamilton, complete with original risers, treads, balusters, ornamental scrollwork and support structure. It will be rebuilt in its original form.

“Alexander Hamilton ran up those very treads!” said Steve Laise, chief of cultural resources of Manhattan sites for the National Park Service, which owns and runs the Grange. “It just puts you in such close proximity with the past. For those of us who really wish we were living back then anyway, it’s probably more of a stimulus to our imagination than we really ought to have.”

Lovely exterior details are also evident for the first time in more than a century, including a triple-hung sash window. Smaller windows on either side have an alternating star-and-circle tracery. “That kind of pattern is well rooted in 18th-century Anglo-American design practice,” said Seth Joseph Weine, a fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America.

Last week, the Grange was raised up and over a loggia, or side porch, at St. Luke’s and now sits on steel beams atop nine dollies in the middle of Convent Avenue. On Saturday, it will be rolled down the avenue; turned east onto 141st Street; rolled down a hillside with a 6 percent grade, past Steinman Hall of City College; turned south at Hamilton Terrace; then rolled into the park.

Windows, especially those at the corners, will be among the most vulnerable areas. To reduce any chance that the structure will shift out of shape, it is being bound tightly with wire rope and tied diagonally to the beams on which it is now supported. The chimneys are also to be braced.

Twice during the move, the house will be inspected. Windows will be tested to ensure that they are operable, meaning that no undue pressure is being exerted against the frames. Existing plaster cracks, already documented, will be checked to make certain they are not widening. If problems do arise, Mr. Spaulding said the house can be releveled by adjusting the blocking between the steel beams and the frame of the structure.

For now, he does not anticipate any need to halt the move outright.

As for that 6 percent slope on 141st Street, Mr. Spaulding said the contractor “is very confident that the grade is not going to be a problem.”

“He’s moved houses down grades like that before,” he added. The move itself is being done by Wolfe House and Building Movers of Bernville, Pa. The general contractor is Integrated Construction Enterprises of Belleville, N.J.

Each of the nine dollies has its own propulsion and braking system, Mr. Spaulding said, powered electrically and hydraulically. “If there’s any failure of the systems,” he said, “the brakes lock up.” There are four brakes on each dolly, for a total of 36 brakes.

Mr. Spaulding and his colleagues will breathe easier on Saturday night, but given the reconstruction and restoration ahead, they will not have much chance to relax. “Our goal for reopening the house would be the fall of next year,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to do.”

Brazilian and US scientists have found the rainforest emits more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than it absorbs when conditions are very wet. Their report, published in the journal Science, comes just three days before the latest United Nations negotiations on climate change take
place in Milan. The researchers say previous studies have almost certainly over-estimated how much CO2 the Amazon can take in.

The study by Scott Saleska, from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is pertinent because the idea of using forests to curb global warming forms a central plank of the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty allows countries to plant new trees and conserve old forests rather then cut the amount of greenhouse gases they produce.

But this latest research undertaken over three years in the Amazon provides graphic new evidence that the relationship between trees and carbon dioxide is a complex one. Saleska's study of old-growth Amazonian rainforest shows clearly that drought or other disturbances that kill trees can lead to higher levels of carbon dioxide release. These increases in carbon loss occur during wet seasons when the dead wood breaks down, not during the dry season as has been generally found.

Many environmentalists believe that politicians have run ahead of scientific understanding in giving forestry such prominence in the Kyoto Protocol.
They argue tree planting has been seized on not because it is good science, but because it is politically expedient.

"Here," said Henrietta Kassaris, 69, of Glenville, as she passed the bag to Serafin. "I found it on my belly." Serafin, 49, the lab's director for four years, squinted at a black dot on the corner of the towel.

"It's definitely a female deer tick," he said, removing the 4-millimeter insect with tweezers and transferring it to a smaller bag. "It's the one that carries Lyme disease. But this tick doesn't look engorged. If they stay on three or four days to feed, they swell up with blood. The longer they
are on, the more likely they are to pass on the bacteria that causes Lyme disease."

Kassaris nodded. "I was out yesterday working in the garden," she said. Before she left, Kassaris agreed to have the lab test her tick for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that, when transmitted through the bite of infected ticks, causes Lyme disease.

A disease endemic to southwestern Connecticut, Lyme symptoms may include blurry vision, loss of reflexes, dementia, forgetfulness, depression and almost 100 other symptoms. A 2002 Connecticut Department of Public Health study found 4,631 Lyme disease cases in the state. Twenty-eight
percent of those cases came from Fairfield County. Lyme disease activists say the actual number of Lyme cases could be 10 times greater because the blood tests used to diagnose the disease are not totally accurate.

The lab, in the basement of Town Hall, is the only town-operated public health lab in the state that does the test. Serafin, bacteriologist Yvette Ghannam and chemist Ken Roper have already tested 118 ticks this spring, and forwarded another 66 to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. The town's lab charges $41 to residents and $50 to nonresidents to perform the test. For a $7 handling fee, people can send ticks to the state lab, which tests for free. The state returns results in about a month, Serafin said, while the town lab's results are ready within a week. Both labs do the same test and are equally accurate, Serafin said.

About 40 percent of the ticks brought to the lab test positive for the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and the first week of May marks an important time for awareness, Serafin said. "The ticks around now are last year's adults that didn't find a blood meal last fall," he said, as he dropped Kassaris' tick onto a counter. "Eggs laid last August hatched into larvae, and now they're coming to the next stage, when they're called nymphs."

Ticks feed only three times in their two-year lives: as larvae, as nymphs, and then as adults. At 1 millimeter long, nymphs are difficult to find, which makes them particularly dangerous, Serafin said. Most ticks the lab receives are adults, and Serafin and his co-workers follow a careful procedure to test them for Borrelia burgdorferi.

After a tick is identified as the type that carries the Lyme disease bacteria, it is dropped into a tube, mashed up, heated, and put into a centrifuge, Serafin said. A gift of Time For Lyme Inc. -- a Greenwich-based Lyme disease agency that raises money for advocacy, research and education --
the centrifuge is a device that extracts DNA from blood by spinning rapidly.

"It separates solids from liquids and also extracts hemoglobin," Serafin said. The hemoglobin can interfere with the process by producing a false negative, he said. The lab's weekly tests begin on Thursday, when a tray full of ticks' blood is carried in labeled tubes to an environmentally protected area called a biological safety cabinet, to set up the specimens for a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.

"PCR basically amplifies the DNA of the Lyme disease bacteria to a detectable level," Serafin said. "It allows us to see the DNA we want to test for." That happens through a process that starts with denaturation, where the ticks' blood is heated up so that strands of DNA undo themselves.
After specific "primer" DNA strands pinpoint the target DNA -- in this case, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease -- duplicate strands of target DNA are synthesized. The process is repeated hundreds of times from Thursday afternoon through Friday morning, when the bacteria's DNA has been copied and reproduced so many times that it can be detected by a process called "gel electrophoresis."

All DNA is electrically charged and has a specific size and shape. In gel electrophoresis, these two properties are used to separate DNAs in a gel pad with an electrical field. Using a pipette to remove a drop of blood from each tube, Serafin places each DNA sample on a gel pad and leaves it for an hour, as electric current streams through it.

"The electric current pushes the DNA we want to test for through the gel," Serafin said. "After an hour, we take the gel pad and place it under an ultraviolet transilluminator," a light box that reads dye-stained DNA.

"The gel contains a DNA stain that glows orange when it's under the ultraviolet light," Serafin said, "so all the DNA molecules will absorb it, and it makes a pattern. It's actually very beautiful." It's even more beautiful if Serafin tells clients that their results are negative when they call him on
Friday afternoons.

For more information about tick-testing or prevention, look for brochures outside the health department's offices on the third floor of Town Hall. If you find a tick, call the laboratory at 622-7843/7846, or just come by with your tick, dead or alive. The lab is in the ground level of Town Hall.