Apartments

The banner at Greenmount Avenue and Preston Street proclaims the Lillian Jones Apartments are coming. For the past year, I've watched this building take shape in a neighborhood that needed all the help it could get. Come spring, new tenants will begin moving into these 74 units of affordable housing. As City Councilman Carl Stokes told me, Greenmount and Preston had been a "horrible corner. " That's changed as work crews complete the apartment building and rebuild numerous adjacent rowhouses.

A two-alarm fire that began in a trash compactor temporarily displaced about 20 residents of a Towson apartment building late Sunday and into Monday morning, according to the Baltimore County Fire Department. The residents of the Virginia Towers complex, in the 500 block of Virginia Avenue, were evacuated from the building shortly after 11 p.m., when firefighters responded for reports of smoke in several floors of the building and located the fire in the building's compactor, the department said.

Good God this show is depressing. It's fun to look at dead bodies and blood and guts a little bit, but then you throw in all the nihilistic conversation and abandoned long distance hikers and by the end of the episode you're just like ._. This episode was kind of a departure from the norm because it didn't really address the Woodbury-Prison storyline at all, and it really only featured four characters: Rick, Carl, Michonne and ... Morgan!...

Among the 63 calls for medical and fire-rescue service the Arbutus Volunteer Fire Department received During the period Feb. 17-23 were the following: Pleasant Valley Drive, 1300 block, 10:17 p.m. Feb. 20. Crews from the Arbutus and Woodlawn volunteer stations responded to the report that a person was having a stroke in the Westview area of Catonsville. One seriously ill person taken to a local hospital. Bloomsbury Avenue, unit block, 10:42 a.m. Feb. 20. Crews from the Arbutus, Lansdowne and Violetville volunteer stations and Catonsville, Halethorpe, Randallstown, Westview and Woodlawn career stations responded to the report of an apartment fire in Catonsville.

Now offering its fifth production since opening in the 2011-2012 season, Compass Rose Theater seems comfortably rooted in its strip-mall Eastport Shopping Center location. The cozy storefront lends an offbeat charm to the company's current offering, Neil Simon's 1963 comedy classic, "Barefoot in the Park. " This early play enjoyed success on Broadway before becoming a 1967 movie with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. It came at the threshold of Simon's storied career, which ultimately included more Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer's.

An apartment developer from Northern Virginia recently broke ground on a 304-unit luxury building just south of the Johns Hopkins medical campus in East Baltimore. The five-story complex will be called Jefferson Square at Washington Hill. It is being constructed on a plot located between N. Wolfe and N. Washington streets off E. Fayette Street that used to be the site of the low-income Chapel NDP Apartments, which was razed in 2006. The McLean, Va., based developer of the new structure, Jefferson Apartment Group, also manages properties in Washington, Philadelphia and Florida.

Howard County fire officials say two people were injured in an apartment fire that occurred Saturday evening in the 9100 block of Gracious End Court in Columbia. Shortly before 8 p.m., Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue units responded to an automatic fire alarm, and the county 911 center also received calls about a fire and a possible burn victim. Responders found there had been a flash fire in the dining room of a third floor apartment. Officials said the fire caused a sprinkler to activate, and the blaze was extinguished.

Distracted by the deadly violence in Mali and Algeria, no one seems to be paying adequate attention to the tragicomedy under way in Pakistan. This matters because recent events demonstrate without equivocation that Pakistan is an utterly failed state -- but one that possesses nuclear weapons. The country is tumbling down the abyss. Where else could a fundamentalist Muslim cleric who lives in Canada draw tens of thousands of fans to a rally calling for dissolution of the government -- speaking from inside a shipping container with a bulletproof window?

State fire marshals on Friday arrested a Perryville man accused of setting his apartment on fire, officials said Saturday. Isaac M. Chestnut, 57, is being held at Cecil County Detention Center on three charges of arson and malicious burning. Neighbors called 911 after the fire ignited around 4:30 p.m. in a two-story building in the 600 block of Broad St. in Perryville. The building housed three apartments above businesses, including a pizza shop. The fire caused more than $1,000 in damage, state fire officials said.

As part of her push to increase Baltimore's population, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to introduce legislation to the City Council next week that will provide generous tax breaks to builders of apartment buildings downtown and in six other neighborhoods. "It will promote development in areas right now where the market might not have the proper stimulus," said Bill Henry, vice chairman of the City Council's taxation committee. The tax credit proposal is one of Rawlings-Blake's most direct legislative efforts to increase the population and could prove to be a significant tool to reinvigorate underused buildings and stagnating sections of the city.