Downtown Business

Plans to move Our Daily Bread's soup kitchen from downtown Baltimore are moving closer to fruition as Baltimore officials and downtown business leaders discuss possible relocation sites, including a former city school across from Green Mount Cemetery.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that he will meet later this month with a committee of business and civic leaders established to explore moving Our Daily Bread from Cathedral and Franklin streets near the Basilica of the Assumption. The Downtown Partnership, a group of business owners, has said that a half-dozen sites are being considered.

Allen Wilson takes one last drag of his cigarette before passing it to Tyrone Savage, their eyes squinting through the smoke as they ponder some food for thought: What should be done with Our Daily Bread?What should be the future of Baltimore's most famous soup kitchen, which feeds 900 inner-city poor a day on Cathedral Street, a path of downtown business and cultural resurgence.What should happen to the facility that over the past decade has tripled the number of people it feeds while the neighborhood complains about a rise in car window smashings and robberies.

Hoping to make the rest of downtown as well groomed as the Inner Harbor, the city is drawing up plans to spend $40 million to spruce up its business district with colored pavements, fancy light fixtures, landscaping, street repair and antique-style benches.The proposal calls for the city to shoulder most of the expense over the next several years, but the improvement costs could run into thousands for Baltimore's biggest business owners.Downtown property owners already are hearing the sales pitch from officials of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, which is spearheading the project.

Westminster met Robert L. and David M. Max in 1991, when the brothers from Pikesville bought the downtown Winchester Exchange building at a bargain price.Nearly six years later, they have become major players in the revitalization of the city's business district, acquiring three large properties and negotiating for a fourth.They have put fresh, clean faces on key downtown buildings such as the Winchester Exchange and the old J. C. Penney store on West Main Street, and filled vacant spaces with offices and small shops.

Looking for a little holiday cheer yesterday, Mary Ann Hugg found it in Annapolis at the Christmas Spirit shop on Main Street where business was brisk and smiles were plentiful."

A small army has descended on downtown Baltimore with jackhammers, broomsticks and garden hoes in hopes of putting a new face on an aging business district.For weeks, Department of Public Works crews have checked off items from a long list of projects to beautify downtown: repave Calvert and Charles streets, plant flowers along Pratt Street, repaint crosswalks, and repair curbs and sidewalks."We have some neat projects that we are doing to make downtown look good," said Public Works Director George G. Balog.

Let them eat steak.Morton's of Chicago, The Steakhouse, said yesterday that it will open at the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel next spring, a decision that most said was good news for downtown, business people, steak-eaters and steak-servers alike."

After years of suffering from a business exodus, Baltimore's downtown appears poised to recapture lost white-collar jobs and the sense of economic momentum that has been absent throughout the 1990s.The groundswell of activity, although preliminary in some cases, would bring hundreds of professional jobs downtown in the wake of corporate downsizings, bank consolidations, concerns over safety and a lack of economic development initiatives.The influx of jobs, along with high-profile public projects such as the $150 million Convention Center expansion, entertainment-oriented ventures such as the $27 million conversion of the abandoned Fishmarket to a children's museum and Cordish Co.'s planned $18 million renovation of the derelict Power Plant, might even contribute to major new development.

A 41-year-old man suspected in the holdups of 29 businesses -- most in downtown Baltimore -- was arrested yesterday after he held police at bay by putting a gun to his head while cornered in an alley off West Fayette Street.Police suspect that Edward Oliver Mason Jr. has been "on a one-man commercial armed robbery crime spree" since November, said Agent Robert W. Weinhold Jr., a police spokesman.Mr. Mason, who has no fixed address, is suspected of targeting book stores, pharmacies, shoe outlets, fast-food restaurants and flower shops, police said.