Corporate Headquarters

BY SUMMER, USF&G Corp. will no longer be a major publicly held company based in Baltimore. The city's largest property and casualty insurer is being merged into St. Paul Cos. For Baltimore, this change is unsettling, but it does not have to be bad news.USF&G will join a long list of home-grown firms -- Alex. Brown & Sons, Noxell, A. S. Abell Co. -- acquired by or merged into out-of-town companies. With corporate merger activity at its highest levels in a century, the list of companies with local headquarters dwindles.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. may have lost a merger partner, but the city has retained a corporate headquarters at a time when big business' presence downtown has been steadily vanishing.In the wake of the decision last week by BGE and Potomac Electric Power Co. to scrap their $3 billion merger, the Baltimore-based power concern intends to maintain its headquarters at 39 W. Lexington St., where it has been for 180 years."Our plans are to keep the headquarters in Baltimore at the present time," said Arthur J. Slusark, a BGE spokesman.

Picking the partners for this match wasn't hard.The Cosmetic Center had been floundering after the death of its forceful founder, Louis R. Weinstein. Its growth was stymied, it was recording losses and the Savage-based hair care and cosmetic company was having difficulty with getting certain products.Along came Revlon Inc., displaying Prestige Fragrance & Cosmetics Inc., a wholly owned retail subsidiary it was ready to spin off.Prestige, with 197 stores in outlet malls nationwide, had been a useful outlet for excess Revlon inventory.

Just a few years ago, Loveton was a quiet agricultural community of cornfields and woodlands. Today the rolling fields north of Hunt Valley are sprouting a very different crop: hundreds of high-paying jobs and the largest concentration of corporate headquarters outside downtown Baltimore.From this 1 1/2 -square-mile area, Fila USA courts famous athletes such as professional basketball player Grant Hill, McCormick & Co. oversees its international spice market and Becton Dickinson Microbiology Systems designs equipment to diagnose infectious diseases.

MBNA Corp., bucking a decade-long trend of corporate defections and downsizing in Maryland, said it intends to establish a mid-Atlantic regional headquarters in the Baltimore area that will create as many as 2,000 high-paying jobs by the end of the decade.At that size, the move by the world's second largest credit card company would mark the largest private-sector relocation to the region since General Electric Co. created its now defunct East Coast appliance manufacturing operation in Columbia in 1971.

GTS Duratek, a Columbia environmental services and technology company, broke ground yesterday for a 35,000-square-foot corporate headquarters at 10100 Columbia Road in the Rivers Center near Kings Contrivance.The headquarters, projected to be completed in early December, will more than doublethe company's current site at 8955 Guilford Road in the Rivers Business Commons.A spokeswoman said the company plans to add 25 to 30 workers in the next two to three years. The company increased its staff by 70 percent in the last three years.

Members of the Class of 1996, as I stand here before you, gazing out upon your eager young faces, watching me so intently, the question that comes to my mind is: What if I have to scratch myself? I'd have to distract you somehow, perhaps by ... Hey! Look over there! The Unabomber!No, sorry, I was mistaken. Anyway, members of the Class of 1996, today is a very big day for you. For today you will leave the safety and comfort of the academic world -- a world of college and classes; of tests and teams; of professors and proms; of books and barfing on your roommate after attending the Phi Delta Zeet fraternity's Quart Size Martini Night.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT leaders for Annapolis and Anne Arundel County nearly fell out of their chairs last week when the Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s corporate headquarters dropped into their laps like manna from heaven. BGE -- soon to be the nation's ninth-largest utility after a merger with the Potomac Electric Power Co. -- intends to move its headquarters from Baltimore to the Annapolis area by 1997.Economic development officials, who spend months trying to woo corporations with a fraction of the impact that the BGE-Potomac deal represents, are not exaggerating when they say the significance of this move goes far beyond the 200 or so managerial jobs it will bring.

A story Wednesday about Alex. Brown Inc.'s planned relocation to Commerce Place incorrectly described one of the building's tenants. Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall is an architectural/engineering firm.The Sun regrets the error.Alex. Brown Inc., the venerable investment banking firm whose threat to leave Baltimore raised questions about the city's economic viability, has tentatively committed to keep its headquarters downtown well into the next century.The company's decision to lease at least five floors of the Commerce Place skyscraper, which it plans to announce this morning, will keep 920 well-paid professionals downtown.

J. Schoeneman Inc., a 105-year-old manufacturer of menswear, will close its Owings Mills distribution center and move that work to its main factory in Chambersburg, Pa.The decision will move 55 jobs out of state. But Schoeneman said its headquarters, which employs 145 people, will stay in Baltimore County at a yet undetermined site.The action comes shortly after the state has suffered two other economic setbacks -- the announcement by London Fog Corp. that it will close three Maryland plants and lay off 700 workers by the end of October, and the decision by Starbucks Corp.