Colonnade

The Colonnade is home to a new restaurant, once again. The Spice Company was set to open today in the space previously inhabited by Four West and the Polo Grill. The name of the eatery may be new, but those behind it are familiar to many in Baltimore's dining-out crowd. Keir Singh owns the successful Indian restaurant the Ambassador Dining Room and the popular Lebanese Carlyle Club - both in the same Johns Hopkins neighborhood as the Colonnade. His partners - John Yuhanick and son Todd Yuhanick - have helped open and promote a number of local restaurants over the years through their public-relations firm.

Robert Walter Miller Jr., a retired businessman and co-founder of Filterite Corp. who was an avid model railroader, died Saturday of liver cancer at the Colonnade in the city's Tuscany- Canterbury neighborhood. He was 84. Mr. Miller, whose father owned an egg and butter business and whose mother was a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised near Lake Montebello. He was a City College graduate and earned a bachelor's degree in business in 1948 from the Johns Hopkins University.

Up to 45 vacant residences at the Colonnade, one of Baltimore's most upscale condominium projects, will go on the auction block early next month as part of a new strategy by developers Richard and Howard Rymland to accelerate sales.Originally priced from $138,000 to $494,500, the condominiums could sell for far less than that. Suggested opening bids range from $50,000 for an executive studio to $150,000 for a three-bedroom penthouse residence with den and library.The auction will be held June 8 at noon in the Stouffer's Inner Harbor Hotel.

The Colonnade is home to many condos, but not many like the one owned by Rosemary Nicolosi of Baltimore. The building itself, located in the Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood, is from the 1980s and its units typically reflect '80s interior design, including white carpet and plenty of marble. But Nicolosi tossed all of that out the window when she bought her condo a few years ago. "She re-did everything," says Realtor Kelly Stucker of Yerman, Witman, Gaines and Garceau LLC. "It took a year to finish it."

For the next three months, buyers of residences in the Colonnade condominiums may also receive, tax-free as part of their purchase, enough funds to cover a substantial portion of a grandchild's college education.If the buyers are relatively young and can't yet afford a mortgage payment at the Colonnade but expect a raise in the near future, they may qualify for a "lifestyle subsidy payment" that would give them $500 a month for the first 18 months after they move in to bridge the gap.If they are worried about selling their current house, the developers of the Colonnade will guarantee the sale for them.

After building a network of 60 upscale hotels in 23 years, the Doubletree hotel chain has arrived in Maryland.The area's first Doubletree hotel opened this summer at the Colonnade, a 2-year-old condominium and inn complex at 4 W. University Parkway, just north of the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus in Baltimore.Doubletree replaced the Potomac Hotel Group, original operator of the 125-room Inn at the Colonnade. The Phoenix-based hotel chain has a five-year contract to manage the inn, which occupies the first three floors of the 11-story building.

Being both a special occasion restaurant and a hotel dining room is a tough balancing act. A few places manage it -- Hampton's in Harbor Court comes to mind -- but for the Inn at the Colonnade, it's not so easy. After all, Harbor Court has a second, less-formal dining room. What this means is that you could be going to the Club at the Colonnade to celebrate your wedding anniversary and be eating next to someone wearing a baseball cap. That happened to me on my first visit a couple of months ago (sitting next to the cap, not having a wedding anniversary)

The owners of the Colonnade condominium and hotel complex plan to try next week to stop a creditors' bid to force the complex into bankruptcy.Colonnade attorney Paul Nussbaum was on vacation yesterday and could not be reached for comment. But Lawrence Yumkas, a lawyer in Mr. Nussbaum's firm of Whiteford, Taylor and Preston, said legal papers would be filed soon.Washington-based Tiber Construction Co. and two other creditors filed a petition Tuesday to force Colonnade L.P., which owns the Colonnade, into involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which provides for liquidation of the company.

The auction of The Colonnade, home to one of Baltimore's fanciest luxury hotels and the Polo Grill restaurant, was halted at the last minute yesterday after three creditors sought to force the partnership that owns the upscale development into bankruptcy.The involuntary bankruptcy petition, filed in federal court in Baltimore, was a surprise move on the part of the creditors, who claimed they were owed a total of nearly $4 million.The step came just hours before the property was to be auctioned off because of the partnership's default on a $22 million construction loan to the Marine Midland Realty Credit Corp.

The Washington company that owns the mortgage on the Colonnade hotel and condominium bought most of the complex at a foreclosure auction yesterday for $4.2 million. Only three of the building's nine remaining condominiums sold to third-party buyers.The complex was put up for auction after a partnership led by developer Richard Rymland defaulted on a $16 million mortgage on the West University Parkway property in Baltimore. Marine Midland Bank of Buffalo, N.Y., sold the loan to an affiliate of Washington-based Bresler & Reiner Inc., a real estate development company, for $10 million.

The Doubletree Inn at The Colonnade in North Baltimore has been purchased by Washington-based RWN Development Group LLC and will undergo a $3 million face-lift, according to Ventura Commercial Mortgage Company, which handled the deal. The property, which will convert from a Doubletree affiliate to a full franchise operation, was purchased from Bresler & Reiner Inc., a Washington development company, for $15 million, according to James P. Ventura, president of the commercial mortgage company.

Food: *** (3 STARS) Service: *** (3 STARS) Atmosphere: *** (3 STARS) It's about time. The restaurant space in the Colonnade may finally be filled with the right sort of tenant. Not that there was anything much wrong with the Polo Grill, Four West or the Club at the Colonnade - the previous occupants - except that they all had upscale hotel prices. The new owners have swept away all traces of the old Polo Grill, which in its heyday was one of Baltimore's finest. The restaurants that followed it had clung to a few of its signature dishes, most notably the fried lobster tail and white chocolate banana cream pie. At Spice Company, they are replaced by a grilled lobster tail with wild mushroom risotto and minted pea puree at about half the price, and the ever-popular creme brulee or key lime pie. A new beginning is a good idea, especially when it involves neighborhood-friendly prices (nothing on the menu is over $25)

The Colonnade is home to a new restaurant, once again. The Spice Company was set to open today in the space previously inhabited by Four West and the Polo Grill. The name of the eatery may be new, but those behind it are familiar to many in Baltimore's dining-out crowd. Keir Singh owns the successful Indian restaurant the Ambassador Dining Room and the popular Lebanese Carlyle Club - both in the same Johns Hopkins neighborhood as the Colonnade. His partners - John Yuhanick and son Todd Yuhanick - have helped open and promote a number of local restaurants over the years through their public-relations firm.

Being both a special occasion restaurant and a hotel dining room is a tough balancing act. A few places manage it -- Hampton's in Harbor Court comes to mind -- but for the Inn at the Colonnade, it's not so easy. After all, Harbor Court has a second, less-formal dining room. What this means is that you could be going to the Club at the Colonnade to celebrate your wedding anniversary and be eating next to someone wearing a baseball cap. That happened to me on my first visit a couple of months ago (sitting next to the cap, not having a wedding anniversary)

A MEMORABLE PLACE Great beauty in unkind city By Michael Purdy SPECIAL TO THE SUN I did not like Florence, and Florence did not appear to like me. A small Italian city, Florence pulls in tourists at a rate comparable to that of Paris or Rome. They flood the museums, churches and piazzas, great gaggles of people from all over the world, bobbing along behind tour guides. It didn't help that I'd been in Europe on my own for a week, and was starting to feel lonely. Walking into Florence alone and trying to find a hotel was such a smack in the face that I nearly got back on the train.

The fantastic stories and superheroic journeys of comic books take Joey Cramer far away from his pain. He's very sick and very frail, but very smart and creative, always drawing and dreaming, imagining himself among the superheroes. He loves comic books. Friday he goes into the comic book business.Fifteen years old, terminally ill with cystic fibrosis, Joey Cramer is getting his very own store -- a kiosk in Columbia Mall, stocked by local distributors, including Steve Geppi's Diamond Comics.

As many as 45 condominiums at Baltimore's posh Residences of the Colonnade will be among those available to prospective buyers at an auction this Saturday.One condominium, pardonez moi, will not be included in the auction. It is the Colonnade's two-story penthouse, "Loggia in the Sky," a 6,000-square-foot duplex that has its own, private elevator and comes with a 1991 Rolls Royce Corniche convertible as part of an asking price of $1.3 million.Selling for considerably less will be those units at the Colonnade that will go to auction.

The Colonnade, home to one of Baltimore's premier luxury hotels and the stylish Polo Grill restaurant, is headed to foreclosure auction July 13 because its owners defaulted on a $22 million construction loan.The auction, which would include nine of the 119 condominiums that are part of the West University Parkway development, results from one of the hidden causes of the real estate crisis: developers' inability to replace short-term construction loans with long-term mortgages after the real estate crash began in 1989.

Reich mulls higher minimum wageLabor Secretary Robert B. Reich suggested yesterday that he might recommend raising the hourly minimum wage by 50 cents, although the increase could be somewhat less to help employers cover the costs of complying with proposed health-care reforms.Mr. Reich said the current $4.25-an-hour minimum wage, when adjusted for inflation, is 30 percent below what it was in 1968. An increase to $4.75 an hour would recover only part of the loss, he said.Ruling backs Colonnade foreclosureJudge James F. Schneider of U.S. Bankruptcy Court yesterday dismissed a bankruptcy petition filed against the Colonnade hotel and condominium complex in Baltimore by contractors who worked on the building.