Auction Block

Annapolis' historic Market House is apparently up for bid again after the company that had taken over the lease for the shed-like building withdrew from the project. Mayor Ellen O. Moyer said yesterday that bidders will have until Oct. 6 to submit new proposals for the 146-year-old city-owned building by the City Dock, which has been vacant all year. Aware that the Market House's fortunes has become a hot topic of conversation and a political issue in November's mayoral election, she said she was eager for a fresh start.

In The Region Angelina's eatery of crab cake fame on the auction block Angelina's, a Northeast Baltimore restaurant known for its crab cakes, is going on the auction block at 1 p.m. April 25, according to Alex Cooper Auctioneers. The land, building, liquor license and recently remodeled restaurant at 7153 Harford Road all will be sold on the premises. The Italian and seafood restaurant, opened in 1952 in a rowhouse, has maintained its reputation in the city as a place to go for jumbo crab cakes through three sets of owners.

Real estate, real hype This is the time of year when over-the-top decorations scream "SEASON'S GREETINGS" along the 700 block of West 34th St. in Hampden. Along with the usual blinking lights, Santa Clauses and giant candy canes, a more understated sign stood in one yard recently. It read: "Open House." And it drew potential home-buyers like moths to an overloaded Christmas tree. "It was probably the biggest open house we ever had - 800, 1,000 people. We absolutely lost count," said real estate agent Mike Sloan.

Will the Old Goucher Historic District become Baltimore's next hot neighborhood? The answer could depend on what happens to one of the district's most prominent buildings when it goes up for auction next week. The former headquarters of the Federal Land Bank of Baltimore, built starting in 1926 at 2315 St. Paul St., will be offered for sale at 2 p.m. Dec. 14. Now largely vacant, the six-story structure is one of the largest office buildings in the historic district where Goucher College operated before moving to Baltimore County in the 1940s.

A rare, forgotten letter that George Washington wrote from his Army headquarters at New Windsor, N.Y., to his old Virginia friend Bryan Fairfax in June 1779 will be sold today at the Alex Cooper Auction Galleries in Towson. Richard Hall, a Cooper appraiser with a special interest in documents and paper ephemera, recently found the letter in the possessions of a "Baltimore lady" from "an old Maryland family with connections to Virginia." She moved from an apartment in North Baltimore to an assisted-living facility and was condensing her holdings and dearly desired anonymity, he said.

The commanding Dumbarton House in Pikesville was built in 1860 as a wedding gift for the son of one of Baltimore's wealthiest residents and his bride. One hundred forty years later, a used car salesman and a construction-company heiress planning to marry bought the house on the Internet. Then their relationship fell apart, the salesman was found dead on the front seat of his gold-colored Rolls Royce, and his family gave the house back to the lender to repay his debts. So at noon today, the Victorian-style house - complete with a new eight-car garage - is up for grabs.

Sherry Carroll of West Friendship had to have a 4-foot-tall brown rabbit carved out of a log. She saw it Friday at the Howard County Fairgrounds in West Friendship as the Howard County Antique Farm Machinery Club was preparing for its annual fund-raising auction. Yesterday morning, she was standing near the item until it came up for bid. But because the event is a chance for people to sell an expansive variety of items, she had to wait as auctioneer Randy Ridgely offered up tools, garden implements and hardware.

Ernest Murphy was going with his entrepreneur's heart when he bought the storied Eager House restaurant building in 1992. But he turned to his economist's mind when he decided to put it on the auction block today. Murphy's dream of resurrecting the former restaurant icon did not go as planned. Reviews were good, but the economy was not. The Eager House, which opened in 1947, was often more successful with its menu than with its bottom line. It had experienced several lives when it closed in the early 1980s.

The fallout from a $500 million earnings overstatement at Columbia-based U.S. Foodservice will likely hit hardest in Europe and South America as parent company Royal Ahold NV moves to sell underperforming assets to pay off its debts, analysts said yesterday. That means U.S. Foodservice and Giant Food Inc. - two of the Dutch food giant's key cash generators in the United States - will probably be spared from the auction block in the near term. But industry experts said the Columbia institutional food supplier could face an uncertain future if the depth of the company's accounting irregularities turn out to be deeper than the $500 million estimate disclosed Monday by Ahold officials.