City Fair

The City of Annapolis will host its second City Fair downtown on Saturday and Sunday. Many of the attractions will have a nautical bent, including the Pride of Baltimore II , which will dock at City Dock at about noon on Saturday. There also will be boats on display in the water and on land from the Marine Corps, the National Sailing Hall of Fame, Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating and the Annapolis Rowing Club. Annapolis Community Boating will offer the chance to use a kayak or canoe, while the Annapolis Sail and Power Squadron will teach knot-tying and the Hospice Cup will have a station for kids to make burgees, which are small flags flown on sailboats.

The City of Annapolis will host its second City Fair downtown on Saturday and Sunday. Many of the attractions will have a nautical bent, including the Pride of Baltimore II , which will dock at City Dock at about noon on Saturday. There also will be boats on display in the water and on land from the Marine Corps, the National Sailing Hall of Fame, Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating and the Annapolis Rowing Club. Annapolis Community Boating will offer the chance to use a kayak or canoe, while the Annapolis Sail and Power Squadron will teach knot-tying and the Hospice Cup will have a station for kids to make burgees, which are small flags flown on sailboats.

A special preview night for this weekend's Baltimore City Fair will be held from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. today, featuring rides only. The fair runs Friday to Sunday on the parking lots at the former Eastern High School across 33rd Street from Memorial Stadium. A $5 entrance fee on preview night entitles fairgoers to unlimited rides. For more information call 547-0015.

Men's college basketball City alum Fair will stay at Syracuse to play senior year Junior men's basketball forward C.J. Fair (City) announced his intention Wednesday to return to Syracuse for his senior season. The All-Big East Conference second-team player considered entering his name in the NBA draft but decided to return to the Orange for his fourth year of eligibility and to complete his degree work. "After talking it over with my family and my coaches, I decided another year at Syracuse was best for me," he said.

The first Baltimore City Fair in 1970 was a novel experience that attempted to duplicate the excitement of a state fair in an urban context. It succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.In retrospect, that fair is now seen as a watershed event that marked Baltimore's turnaround from a decaying smokestack city into a forward-looking metropolis. Above all, the event changed Baltimoreans' feelings about their hometown, instilling optimism and unity of vision at a low ebb in the city's history after the 1968 riots.

When the first City Fair was held in 1970, few suburbanites ventured downtown at night. Not only was there little to see but fear of crime was pervasive. Yet only a few years later -- partly due to enthusiasm generated by the City Fair -- Baltimore became a textbook of urban renaissance with Inner Harbor attractions and the $1 row houses that homesteaders miraculously transformed into some of the most desirable housing in the city.Two decades later, we welcome the City Fair once again. A vagabond of various locations, it is being held on 33rd Street this weekend.

REMEMBER WHEN they stuffed the Baltimore City Fair under the Jones Falls Expressway? Real nice. Few things were as depressing as the sight of the fair, symbol of the rebirth of the old downtown, crammed under a federal highway, right about where it becomes a giant exit ramp, here behind the brick edifice natives still call the Sunpapers. City Fair memory: Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine performing under the traffic noise of the interstate. Those were the days, my friends. We knew they had to end. In its heyday in the 1970s, the fair had been staged in a much nicer place -- along the rim of the Inner Harbor.

THE CITY FAIR, which began in 1970 as a vehicle for promoting city living and neighborhood pride, opens tomorrow in, at long last, a city neighborhood.The fair's setting in Waverly -- specifically, the Venable lot adjacent to Eastern High School and across 33rd Street from Memorial Stadium -- marks the first time the three-day event has been held outside the environs of downtown.In the eyes of many, it's about time."The City Fair has always had neighborhoods at its heart," says Mark Quackenbush, executive director of the fair that traditionally has provided a public platform for backyard boasting.

Richard P. Davis, the retired director of Baltimore's neighborhood markets who had earlier headed the City Fair, died of Parkinson's disease June 21 at a Cumberland nursing home. The former Village of Cross Keys resident was 79. Born in Orange, N.J., he was a graduate of St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Del., and earned a bachelor's degree in English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He worked on newspapers in Meridian, Conn., and Rochester, N.Y., before joining the Evening Sun as a copy editor in 1952.

If Baltimore's neighborhoods are the heart of the City Fair, listen to the heart speak:"Welcome to Mount Holly, neighborhood of love," says a smiling Georgine Edgerton, sitting under the big top at the City Fair. "We are the neighborhood that cares about people, not only in our neighborhood but all over the world.""It's not the suburbs," Sarah E. Quarles says of her Garrison Hills neighborhood, "but it's the next best thing. I can jump on the subway and go to Owings Mills. In 16 minutes.""Kurt Schmoke grew up in our area," says Bernice Smallwood, a resident of Hanlon for 37 years.

For the second time in 40 years, a member of the "Flying Wallenda" family will wow Inner Harbor crowds Wednesday with nothing between him and the murky harbor waters but a wire cable. Self-proclaimed "King of the High Wire" Nik Wallenda will follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Karl, "The Great Wallenda. " While Karl Wallenda crossed the harbor over 600 feet of wire 60 feet in the air in 1973, Nik Wallenda will ascend a wire stretched 300 feet from the Light Street pavilion to a barge in the harbor, up to a height of about 90 feet.

Baltimore's book festival got here first. Organizers of the 16th annual Baltimore Book Festival, which opens Friday, say they aren't fazed that a larger, glitzier, more star-studded event is being held on the exact same weekend just 40 miles to the south. They aren't concerned that the upstart National Book Festival will feature celebrity authors the likes of actress Julianne Moore, or that the Washington extravaganza is expanding this year from one day to two. But not everyone is as gracious.

Imagine a city in which the streets always ran smoothly, with no interruptions for special events. Boring! I get a lot of complaints about the traffic disruptions caused by one event or another taking place in Baltimore. If it's not Artscape or the Book Fair, it's an ethnic festival. If it's not the Baltimore Marathon, it's the Preakness. And then there's the Labor Day weekend Grand Prix , which will find me thousands of miles away in blissful — if coincidental — avoidance.

There were hats, of course, straw boaters at the aquarium and Preakness-worthy confections in Mount Vernon. Then there was the quirkier haberdashery, like a purple top hat one man in Federal Hill swept off as he bowed with a flourish when William Donald Schaefer's casket passed by. There were tribal shout-outs — "Edgewood Street!" one guy kept booming, except he wasn't on Edgewood Street but just proud to hail from it — and old campaign buttons and faded photos and, most of all, memories hauled out of the collective basement of a city that almost pathologically hoards them.

If you lived in Baltimore in the 1970s, it seemed that William Donald Schaefer paved every alley. An exaggeration? Yes. But then, as now, old Baltimore needed a lot of fixing and Schaefer was in his neighborhood mode. He did it well and had the support of some pretty amazing people. He listened to his aides and he also obsessed over letters his constituents mailed him. I recall one night after a City Council meeting when his housing and development chief, Bob Embry, was having dinner at the old Horn and Horn restaurant on Baltimore Street.

The city will offer a series of free health fairs, blood-pressure screenings and walks — including a workout with Ravens running back Ray Rice — later this month as part of Healthy City Days, a new public health awareness campaign. The five-day series of events is intended to bridge the "stark disparities" between the health of the city's poorest residents and of those who live in wealthier neighborhoods, said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. A health department study showed that residents of some communities have an average life expectancy of less than 60 years, while in other neighborhoods, the life expectancy exceeded 80. "We hope to show people that you do not need lots of time or expensive equipment to live a healthy life," Rawlings-Blake said Tuesday at a news conference at the C.C. Jackson recreation center in Park Heights.

If you lived in Baltimore in the 1970s, it seemed that William Donald Schaefer paved every alley. An exaggeration? Yes. But then, as now, old Baltimore needed a lot of fixing and Schaefer was in his neighborhood mode. He did it well and had the support of some pretty amazing people. He listened to his aides and he also obsessed over letters his constituents mailed him. I recall one night after a City Council meeting when his housing and development chief, Bob Embry, was having dinner at the old Horn and Horn restaurant on Baltimore Street.

Hope Quackenbush, a tireless promoter of Baltimore's downtown renaissance as a founder of the City Fair and longtime director of the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, died of dementia Saturday at FutureCare-Cherrywood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Owings Mills. She was 78. Moving to Baltimore from the Midwest in the 1960s, she became a civic activist and city employee and was often credited as one of the architects of Baltimore's rebirth in the next decade - largely through her vision of the City Fair as a showcase of urban diversity.

George A. Piendak, the former Baltimore City budget director who was the longtime board chairman of a culinary arts school, died in his sleep Monday at his Charles Village home. He was 65. Born in New Britain, Conn., he was a political science graduate of Williams College. He earned a master's degree in comparative politics and administration at the University of Sussex in England and took doctoral courses at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined city government in 1970 as a fiscal policy analyst.

Sitting in the shade of their white tents, most vendors here sell photos or paintings, crafts or jewelry. But a handful of people showed up at Artscape yesterday to sell an idea -- that they are the best candidates to lead Baltimore. Among the most well-attended festivals in the city -- organizers estimate 500,000 will have come by the end of today -- Artscape offers political candidates a one-stop spot to shake hands, talk about their platforms and recruit campaign volunteers. Many are taking advantage of the captive audience.