Auction

Is it curtains for the Senator Theatre? The historic and beloved movie house is heavily in debt, and the bank has decided to foreclose. An auction could come as quickly as next month. If the right bidder steps forward, a sale could potentially give the landmark a fresh debt-free start. But a public sale on the sidewalk that resembles the walkway outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre would leave the fate of the Senator in the hands of the highest bidder, who might prefer to hold church services in the grand old palace instead of movie premieres.

Online auction bids for a human kidney recently reached $5.7 million, while offers for 500 pounds of choice marijuana were up to $10 million. Officials at eBay stopped them both but still don't know whether they were hoaxes or not.Either way, the incidents quickly took their place in the pantheon of odd, ridiculous and amazing stuff tucked among the millions of items up for bid each day.One man remembers finding an auction for a human soul, but didn't bid...

FACING A budget deficit of $153 million, the city learned recently that its auctioneer kept $744,636 in proceeds from the sale of abandoned and surplus automobiles. Some of this money has been owed the city since 1994. The total loss was closer to $1 million before the company paid $210,000 of what it owed.Auction Alliances Services Inc. of Towson has said it cannot pay more, so the city is exploring the possibility of legal action and attempting to recoup its loss by calling in the proceeds of bonds posted by the company.

Monica Coleman's dream was sold in dozens of pieces yesterday and carted out of a Pulaski Highway warehouse.Gone after an auction of Coleman Craten LLC's belongings were a 40-foot U-shaped mahogany bar, about 100 telephones, seven leather chairs, three leather sofas, 16 computers and an assortment of chairs, desks, tables and other computer equipment.When it was over, the auction had raised about $90,000 for the bankrupt company's creditors, a group including former employees, investors and unpaid contractors who are owed almost $6 million.

Online auctions are a growing segment of the Web. A pioneer, Ebay, started in 1995 and now lists a couple of hundred thousand items every day; Amazon.com, which began life as a bookseller, recently cobbled on an auction subsection.With these merchandise auctions, the Web site acts as a go-between for individuals selling and individuals buying. Sites that offer travel include Onsale; Adventurebid, which, as its name implies, specializes in such excursions as white-water rafting, ballooning and climbing; Bid4vacations, with cruises, skiing and ranches that take guests; Luxurylink, with high-priced hotels and other destinations; Goinggoinggone, a potpourri; and others.

It began with a $15 bike and ended with three gold rings for $45 -- and in between, yesterday's Baltimore County Police Department auction had bounty aplenty for bargain hunters.Car radios, tools, coolers, coats, clothes, lawn mowers, lamps, curtains, tires, tureens, lawn chairs, televisions, suitcases, fishing rods, fans, bedding, backpacks and even illuminated plastic statues of Joseph and Mary -- the dusty, diverse inventory from the police property department was a discount shopper's dream.

Kassie Foundos flings open the door to her Georgian mansion."You were here the other day!" she gushes to a tall blond woman who smiles stiffly in response. "You had on black leather pants, I remember. Great outfit."The woman barely looks Kassie in the eye and clicks in high heels across the marble foyer without being invited in. She doesn't give her name, and Kassie doesn't ask.This is not a party. This is business.Eager to free themselves of their Annapolis waterfront estate after watching it sit on the market untouched for two years, Kassie Foundos and her husband Mike are peddling their 16-room home the way other wealthy people sell paintings and race horses -- by putting it on the auction block.

It's difficult to put much hope in Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's latest proposal to auction off houses as a means to restore vitality to Baltimore's declining neighborhoods. This will be the mayor's third attempt with this tactic.Earlier he chose some of the most deteriorated abandoned houses in Baltimore to auction, hoping the rock-bottom prices they would sell for would boost interest. But a complex foreclosure process led to only 350 of 1,500 vacant houses being sold in 1993. And in a similar auction last April, only 52 of 125 houses sold and 13 of those bidders failed to qualify for mortgages.

It was just like people expected -- and then some -- as 300 speculators, real estate brokers and curiosity-seekers packed an auction of 25 commercial real estate properties at the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel yesterday.People knew the market for office buildings and warehouses, especially smaller ones, was improving. And they knew the market for undeveloped land is still moribund, as existing buildings sell and rent for prices so low that developers can't absorb the cost of building new buildings and still compete with the old.The result: Most of the 15 buildings offered by Michael Fox Auctioneers of Pikesville and Columbia-based Manekin Corp.

If your home hasn't sold after months or even years, don't despair, says Gloria Lynn Gardner. Put it on the block.Owners of $100 million worth of property in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and three other states have taken that advice. They've put 104 single-family homes, townhouses, condominiums and undeveloped lots up for auction in hopes of selling fast at a four-day, caravan-style sale starting this Friday.Most are individual homeowners fed up with a slowdown in home sales. Others are just getting ready to sell and don't want to wait, said Ms. Gardner, corporate auctioneer for Long & Foster Real Estate Inc."

In the Hollywood version of Wednesday's auction of the Senator Theatre, the auctioneer would have intoned, "Going once, going twice," and right there, in the pregnant pause before he lowered the gavel to the podium and consigned the historic Art Deco movie house to the wrecking ball, a sudden outpouring of community support would have materialized, It's a Wonderful Life-style, to bail out the plucky owner and hero of our story, Tom Kiefaber. Or maybe in a slightly more realistic version, the theater would have been bought by a mysterious bidder who turned out to be a rich, eccentric movie buff and promised to keep the place going.

Baltimore City took ownership of the Senator Theatre after a brief and raucous auction Wednesday, and officials say they want to move forward quickly to develop a permanent plan for the 70-year-old landmark. "The bottom line is, now it is in our hands," said Mayor Sheila Dixon. "We can move fast and aggressively to find the best, responsible business - be it profit or nonprofit - who can manage and handle this theater." City leaders want the theater to continue to show films or to showcase the performing arts and now will look for someone to own or operate the Senator.

The 70-year-old Senator Theatre, the last holdout from the golden age of Baltimore movie houses, is scheduled to go on the auction block Wednesday. Owner Tom Kiefaber, while insisting he accepts that his days of running the theater are numbered, is determined not to let something as arbitrary as an auction decide the building's fate. Kiefaber, who has been showing classic films and selling memorabilia out of the theater lobby since shortly after showing his last first-run film on March 15, accuses city officials of playing "Russian roulette" with the theater if they allow the auction to go on as planned.

The Senator Theatre will go on the auction block July 21. The date was set at Thursday's monthly meeting of the Baltimore Development Corp., which will be overseeing the sale; the minimum bid will be $1 million. No location or starting time for the auction has been set. "If someone is willing to come and bid the million dollars, that's acceptable, and they'll own a theater," BDC executive director Kimberly Clark said. "We'll work with those folks on an outcome that's best for the community."

Instead of "bravo," the final sendoff for the Baltimore Opera Company will be an auctioneer shouting "sold." The giant Sphinx-head that once stared down on the glittery Triumphal March in Aida, the carefully detailed cathedral where Tosca sang a love duet with her painter boyfriend, the scaffold that awaited Mary, Queen of Scots - all sit wrapped up in a warehouse. They, along with hundreds of vivid costumes, props and other remnants of the company, will soon go to the highest bidder. It's a far-from-grand finale for one of the city's oldest cultural treasures.

Is it curtains for the Senator Theatre? The historic and beloved movie house is heavily in debt, and the bank has decided to foreclose. An auction could come as quickly as next month. If the right bidder steps forward, a sale could potentially give the landmark a fresh debt-free start. But a public sale on the sidewalk that resembles the walkway outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre would leave the fate of the Senator in the hands of the highest bidder, who might prefer to hold church services in the grand old palace instead of movie premieres.

The Senator Theatre's bank has notified the city and the owner of the historic movie house that it intends to foreclose on the property. The North Baltimore landmark could stop showing films as early as next week and be sold at auction next month. Owner Tom Kiefaber had been in talks with the city to turn the long-struggling theater into a nonprofit community center that would offer a range of activities beyond movies. But in a letter dated Friday, 1st Mariner Bank informed Kiefaber of its intent to foreclose, potentially derailing the nonprofit plan.

The former residence of Maryland artist Grace Turnbull was withdrawn from a scheduled auction yesterday, but the auctioneers said representatives for Turnbull's estate would still entertain private offers for the property at 223 Chancery Road in Guilford. A sale of Turnbull's personal property, including sculptures, paintings, books and furniture, will proceed during an auction that is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. today at Alex Cooper Auctioneers, 908 York Road in Towson. Turnbull died in 1976 and left her Spanish Colonial-style house and much of her artwork to the Maryland Historical Society, which has maintained them for more than 30 years.

Before her death in 1976, the noted Baltimore artist Grace Turnbull wrote a will leaving her valuable Guilford residence and much of her prized artwork to the Maryland Historical Society, with the stipulation that "the premises be kept intact as far as possible" and perhaps even exhibited "as a memorial to my family and me." But 32 years after she died, Turnbull's vision is coming unraveled, with her house going on the auction block today and its contents following tomorrow. After accepting Turnbull's gift and honoring her wishes for three decades, directors of the historical society relinquished all rights to the Spanish Colonial residence at 223 Chancery Road last year, setting in motion a sequence of events that led to today's sale by Alex Cooper Auctioneers.

If you've had a "For Sale" sign in front of your house for months, you want something to happen and you want it to happen yesterday. William Z. Fox suggests an auction. He would - he's chairman and chief executive of Fox Residential Auctions LLC in Pikesville - but some homeowners heartily agree. As sales and prices dropped nationwide last year, auctioneers' revenue for home sales rose 5.3 percent to almost $17 billion, according to the National Auctioneers Association. Sales revenue has declined since, but not to the extent that you see on multiple-listing services, the more common way that sellers and buyers find each other.