City Plans

The Annapolis administration plans to form two committees by next week to study the construction of a garage on a city-owned site on West Street, as part of a compromise to quell a controversy that has consumed the state capital in recent weeks.Jon Arason, director of the city's Planning and Zoning Department, said he is selecting representatives from downtown Annapolis' residential and business communities to serve on the nine- to 11-member committees. The city also has commissioned a separate study of the historic significance of five turn-of-the-century buildings at the site.

The biggest fireworks display in Baltimore July 3 will be the demolition of a chapter in the history of public housing.City officials plan to ignite 500 pounds of dynamite to blow up the 14-story George B. Murphy Homes public housing complex on the west side.The demolition of the 758-unit complex is the most recent in a series of implosions designed to sweep away the outdated policy of high-rise projects."Baltimore is a boom town," said Mark Loizeaux, president of the city's demolition contractor, Controlled Demolition Inc. of Phoenix in Baltimore County.

Competing theories of urban redevelopment may be headed for a collision on Howard Street, Baltimore's boulevard of broken schemes.What might be termed the big-bang theory for renewing the city's rotting retail district says developers won't risk $350 million building hundreds of apartments and shops unless they have freedom to be creative and are allowed to demolish scores of buildings, if necessary.Another approach, which might be termed the SoHo theory, holds that such large-scale demolition is doomed to fail because distinctive architecture is the only advantage urban areas hold over the boring but convenient suburbs.

Baltimore will receive more than $5 million in federal public safety money that will help provide 150 cameras in police patrol cars, establish the long-awaited downtown community court and beef up security in city schools.The Board of Estimates held a public hearing yesterday on the federal block grant the Bureau of Justice Assistance plans to award the city. The federal government requires that jurisdictions receiving the grants hold a public hearing before spending the money.The board must approve the use of the money, which members are expected to consider after the new year.

Bulldozers scraped soil yesterday from the north face of Federal Hill as part of a $1.9 million project to halt erosion on the historic site overlooking the Inner Harbor.It is the third time in seven years the city has tried to stabilize the 80-foot hill, from which Union troops trained cannons on occupied Baltimore during the Civil War.In 1992, the city spent $1.4 million installing drains and a retaining wall in an attempt to stop the erosion. Three years later, it spent $500,000 trying to repair the drains.

Dumping of construction debris has begun at the former Gwynns Falls quarry, alarming Southwest Baltimore residents who are threatening to sue the city over the matter.In December, the city issued a permit to Potts and Callahan Inc. of Baltimore to dump concrete, bricks, dirt, sand and asphalt at 2900 W. Baltimore St. But neighborhood groups claim that the city pledged to meet with them before allowing the dumping to begin.Residents living near the park are worried that the site will be turned into a landfill, harming the surrounding 2,000 acres of city parkland.

THE ORIOLES have been struggling - actually, I think Davey Johnson has a voodoo doll in his golf bag - but, when you look at the big picture, Baltimore is hot. It's happening. Somebody obviously believes this city is a winner. Add it up:Two, maybe three, big new hotels within a mile of the Convention Center. Plans to redevelop the Hippodrome Theater. Plans to wipe out a section of the Howard Street-Park Avenue area for apartments, offices and, it is hoped, a big retailer or two to bolster the area's shopping district.

City wrecking crews demolished 22 homes along Llewelyn Street yesterday, two weeks after Baltimore police locked up the lone elderly resident on the block and charged him with first-degree murder in the shooting death of a 15-year-old boy.The rowhouses on the narrow East Baltimore alley tumbled easily in a heap of dust, splintered wood and cracked red bricks. People who lived nearby watched the demolition, which took a city Public Works Department crew about an hour to finish.Carolyn Lee, 43, sat on the steps of 1418 Bethel St., at the corner of Llewelyn, staring at the ruined block where she raised three children.

The vexing, twisted saga of selecting a heavily subsidized hotel for downtown Baltimore reaches a crossroads today when the city is expected to decide whether to move forward with the proposed 750-room Wyndham south of Little Italy.The outcome of three months' negotiating with the team assembled by baking mogul John Paterakis Sr. is eagerly and anxiously awaited by a wide range of interests: downtown business leaders, city and state lawmakers, heads of every major tourist attraction, hoteliers, the city's convention bureau and those who book gatherings in the nation's fiercely competitive meetings industry.

In the decade since Kurt L. Schmoke became mayor, the city of Baltimore has prepared master plans to guide development of East Baltimore's "Gold Coast," the downtown business district and the federally designated Empowerment Zone.It has commissioned experts to generate blueprints for greenways, industrial "brownfields" -- even the Inner Harbor shoreline.But tomorrow, the Schmoke administration will embark on its most far-reaching planning effort to date -- a "comprehensive master plan" to guide development of the entire city.

Baltimore plans to lay off 27 employees and contract workers, including a Fire Department commander, to help plug a hole in the city's budget created by declining tax revenues, according to a draft agenda for today's Board of Estimates meeting. "Everybody is feeling this," Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon said Tuesday. "No one is not a part of this." The layoffs would come from six agencies and, along with a proposed citywide furlough plan and other spending reductions, will be presented to the city's spending panel for approval on Wednesday.

I don't know about you, but I find the Container Store catalog practically pornographic. I can spend hours pawing through it, imagining a life in which everything not just has its place, but a color-coordinated, perfectly sized and thoughtfully configured one. But as with all porn, the thrill is illusory. Eventually, I return to the real world, where my clutter remains scattered on countertops or forever underfoot, free radicals that defy containment by mere polypropylene stacking bins or galvanized storage cubes.

Faced with the prospect of divvying up a budget surplus for a third straight year, Baltimore officials unveiled yesterday a plan to spend nearly $19 million in extra money on neighborhood initiatives, arts programs and Mayor Sheila Dixon's anti-litter campaign. Though the city's budget surplus is estimated to be smaller than last year's, it has swollen far beyond earlier projections -- allowing Dixon to spend $4 million on a Park Heights revitalization plan, $1 million to help residents rehab homes and $900,000 for the city's largest art museums.

Nearly two years after the project was announced, Baltimore officials are moving ahead with what would be the city's biggest new housing development in decades -- 1,100 mixed-income units on 130 acres that includes the sites of a vacant low-income apartment complex that would be razed and a prominent church that would be relocated. The city released yesterday a request for qualifications for a master developer for the Uplands Redevelopment Site in Southwest Baltimore, off Edmondson Avenue near the Baltimore County line.

By rejecting Baltimore's plan to seize a bar for its Charles North redevelopment effort, a Circuit Court judge has complicated that urban renewal plan and called into question the city's economic development tactics. Judge John Philip Miller, in an opinion released yesterday, ruled that city economic development officials failed to show "sufficient grounds" to warrant taking the bar through eminent domain. Land-use officials say this could be the first time the court has blocked the city from a "quick take" seizure.

On a patch of downtown where stinky swampland gave way to Colonial-era gambling dens, where a war memorial rose and later fell on hard times, more change is on the way. The city plans a $1.5 million makeover for War Memorial Plaza, hoping to turn what mostly serves as a gathering place for homeless chess players into a more inviting "front lawn" for City Hall and the growing number of downtown apartment-dwellers. Plans call for raising the sunken plaza closer to street level, adding a fountain and trees, and planting grass in the middle of what is now an almost completely paved city block.

Pigtown in Southwest Baltimore has gentrified to the point that City Hall has tried to give it the ritzier name of Washington Village, but dozens of vacant houses continue to blight the area still best known for its slaughterhouse past. Turning abandoned houses into livable homes can be almost as difficult as shaking an unflattering-but-catchy nickname, but that is expected to happen to 24 properties in the neighborhood. The city plans to sell the rowhouses to Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity as part of Mayor Martin O'Malley's Project 5000, a plan to return 5,000 vacant homes to productive use. Terms of the deal have not been worked out, but city officials say the plan shows the value of the project, which for three years has sought to obtain ownership, or clear title, to abandoned houses so that they can be sold and redeveloped.

Annapolis officials are hailing a 300-unit apartment project being built on the site of an old lumberyard on West Street as a catalyst for revitalizing a section of the city's western edge more known for car dealerships, fast-food places and other commercial establishments. Mayor Ellen O. Moyer yesterday praised Westbridge Village - a project on which developers just broke ground - as the first in the area to put the idea of residential and retail mixed use to good use. "West Street is a historic gateway into the city and that corner sets the stage," Moyer said.

City officials want to bring the charm back to Baltimore, and they want to begin with Russell Street, one of the city's most used and bumpy roads. Yesterday, they announced plans to reconstruct the 1 1/2 -mile stretch of road from Interstate 95 south to the city line -- fixing potholes, improving road conditions and making the city's southern entrance more welcoming with stone-covered medians, landscaping and lighting. City officials say they worry that as tourists arrive from the airport and as people drive into town for conventions and ballgames, they get a poor first impression.

After toiling for two years to get title to thousands of vacant houses, Baltimore officials are moving into the next phase of an ambitious renewal plan known as Project 5000: getting rid of the stuff. With computer graphics worthy of a slick real estate broker and simple fliers bearing the slogan "Community for Sale," the city is trying to unload property so it can be redeveloped. "We've got all kinds of property. You want 'em, we got 'em," housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano said at a news conference called yesterday to highlight the progress of Mayor Martin O'Malley's program.