Charles Street

ON CHARLES Street, ghosts happily haunt the landscape. Joy Martin, owner of the Club Charles and The Zodiac next door, insists they hang around her establishments for old time's sake. Who could argue with her? Outside Martin's window, half a block away on the new bridge outside the Pennsylvania Railroad Station last week, there was life where even ghosts formerly stayed away. They staged a block party when they reopened Charles Street. Now you can drive up the city's main north-south corridor to your heart's content.

Strapazza must be doing something right. The popularTowson pizzeria and inexpensive Italian restaurant has spin-offs in Annapolis and now on Charles Street, with a new Strapazza scheduled to open across from Oriole Park at Camden Yards.The Charles Street location puzzles me a little. Towson and Annapolis and Camden Yards make perfect sense, but it wouldn't occur to me to open a restaurant like this in the basement of a downtown office building. What makes the combination lunch and dinner menu so appealing is that it's remarkably inexpensive for dinner.

ARTSHOWCASE336 N. Charles St.Continuing to market and exhibit the works of exclusively Maryland artists, Artshowcase now operates out of a new, permanent home on North Charles Street (formerly Dalsheimer's). Using a unique computerized registry with 1,000 slides from 100 artists, Artshowcase provides to businesses and the public access to artworks based on the client's needs, as selected through 11 indexing categories, including subject, medium and placement area.The major space of the 2,500-square-foot gallery will be devoted to a new show each month, and in a smaller space there will be a continuing, rotating show by Artshowcase members, who each pay $125 a year membership after being interviewed and selected by gallery owner James Dockery.

I RECENTLY published a book subtitled "Recollections of a Baltimore Newspaperman." Recollecting is fun. The trouble is, once you start, you can't stop. Even as I write, my mind is reaching back to a spring afternoon in the '50s when I was summoned to the desk of The Baltimore Sun's city editor."I don't know if you've been following the story," said Paul Banker, handing me an Evening Sun clipping, "but Gypsies are invading the center of town." He made it sound like a mass movement of people, suggestive of the Children of Israel invading the Land of Canaan.

The C. Grimaldis Gallery, one of Baltimore's leadin commercial art galleries, will move from its present location at 1006 Morton St. to downtown Charles Street in March.Gallery owner Constantine Grimaldis said yesterday that his new space would be on Charles Street but that he couldn't confirm an exact location because negotiations were continuing.The Mitchell Baker Galerie will be vacating Grimaldis' former site at 523 N. Charles St. at the end of January, and there is speculation that Grimaldis would move there.

The C. Grimaldis Gallery, the city's most prominent commercial art gallery and a fixture on Charles Street for nearly a decade and a half, is moving out of its location at 523 N. Charles St. after this month and will consolidate its exhibitions at the 1006 Morton St. location it opened 19 months ago."It no longer makes sense to have two spaces in Baltimore in this economy," said gallery owner Constantine Grimaldis, who has operated his gallery at 523 N. Charles St. for the past five years and at 928 N. Charles St. for nine years before that.

Mayor Martin O'Malley unveiled yesterday signs to help guide traffic around the closed Charles Street bridge for a two-year, $23 million construction project that local business owners worry will discourage their customers. The signs will feature a pudgy-cheeked, cross-eyed construction worker wearing a gray tuxedo and scarlet bow tie to lead drivers through a detour to such cultural institutions as the Charles Theater, Everyman Theatre and Club Charles. "Just as nobody told [President Harry S.]

MAY 15 CAME and went this year, and Glimpses saw only one man wearing a straw hat. That is not the way it used to be in Baltimore.Up until World War II May 15 was "Straw Hat Day" -- the day set aside for men to switch from their winter fedoras to lighter, brighter straws.Straw Hat Day was born in Baltimore and enjoyed widespread support here because Baltimore was the world center for the manufacture of straw hats; commercial interests here promoted it strongly.A straw hat was made of braided, dried grasses of one kind or another, shaped either like the traditional felt hat or flat-topped; the latter is sometimes called a "boater" or "skimmer."

Shoppers wander through the Nouveau Contemporary Goods store in the 500 block of North Charles Street, perusing the art deco teapots, tables made from Gothic columns and ceramic Marilyn Monroe and James Dean coffee mugs."

Charles Street, once a thriving shopping district, now suffers a 21 percent vacancy rate for street-level retail space between Pratt Street and North Avenue. An effort is under way to help improve the fortunes of the diverse, 22-block corridor, building on recent investments such as the revamped Walters Art Museum in Mount Vernon. A group of business and civic leaders has set up a private nonprofit group called the Charles Street Development Corp. Its purpose: to lure retailers and developers to the street, in part by tackling problems such as parking.