Ground Floor

The Fells Point Creative Alliance will inaugurate its new performance and screening space on Oct. 7 with a screening of Lydia Douglas' "Nappy." The documentary, an examination of African-American women's relationship with their hair, will be shown at Ground Floor (the former Daily Grind building), 1726 Thames St.Alliance director Megan Hamilton is confident that the move from the group's former space, the Lodge in Highlandtown, will be good for the weekly performance series, which will now take place Thursdays instead of Fridays.

An "Old Fashioned Ice Cream Sunday" will be part of the grand opening Altieri Homes is holding from noon to 4 p.m. June 28 at River Village at Russett in Laurel.River Village is the final phase of development in the 613-acre planned community, which has 12 miles of hike/bike trails, nine tot lots, basketball and beach volleyball courts, five parks, three swimming pools and a six-court tennis complex with stadium seating.A three-level garage townhouse with 1,900 square feet, the Amanda Kristine model has a base price of $149,990.

"X Site 97" is the Contemporary Museum's latest project. Two artists, Teresita Fernandez of Miami and Quisqueya Henriquez of the Dominican Republic, will create an installation in a raw, unfinished space on the ground floor of the Alex. Brown building downtown. Their conceptual work, which involves use of color and arrangement of materials, will be seen in the context of concrete walls and floors and metal ducts.Fernandez manipulates translucent materials and employs techniques of illusion to lead viewers to question their perceptions.

As I travel life's highways I often gaze at other people's homes and ask, "How do they vent their clothes dryer?"Getting the dryer's hot, humid exhaust and its accompanying lint out of the house has been one of my life's quests, at least during the period of my life I have spent dwelling in a rowhouse.Venting a dryer in a detached house is not a big deal. You poke the pipe carrying the dryer's exhaust out an opening in the side of the house. The ideal setup is a short, straight shot using stiff sheet metal ducting that is at least 4 inches in diameter.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke won a pair of Washington Redskins tickets from Washington Mayor Marion Barry after Baltimore's Vincent Pettway successfully defended his International Boxing Federation junior middleweight title at USAir Arena on Saturday by knocking out Simon Brown of Mount Airy.Schmoke, who had wagered a bushel of crabs, declared yesterday Vincent Pettway Day in Baltimore. He presented Pettway with a pewter plate and his manager-trainer, Mack Lewis, with a glass plate.But a bigger reward may be coming.

Asking most drivers about a trip to the Glen Burnie headquarters of the state Motor Vehicle Administration used to be like asking Dante how he liked his trip through the Inferno.No more. Gone from the ground floor is the brown-tan-beige color scheme that could make you queasy. Eighteen months of renovation and $5 million have turned the MVA headquarters into a more civilized and organized government office.The ground floor now is a 40,000-square-foot, 42-window registration center that can handle 90 percent of ordinary transactions.

NEW YORK -- By dark, most people were out and the sound of sirens had started to subside. But a class of kindergartners from P.S. 95 in Gravesend, Brooklyn, was still missing, the subject of an agonizing search. They would not be found until after 7 p.m.Having gone to the World Trade Center as part of an annual school field trip to see the vast expanse of the city from high in the sky, they found themselves, instead, suddenly in the midst of one of those nightmarish moments the city won't soon forget.

Mount Airy Elementary School will be expelling millions of bacteria, school officials say, when contractors rip out the carpet in the first- and second-grade section of the building.And just so the microorganisms don't try to re-enroll, a less hospitable tile floor will replace the carpet by the time students return in September, said Vernon Smith, director of support services for the Carroll County school system.Test results last week showed that carpet in at least four classrooms on the ground floor is a breeding ground for bacteria suspected of causing some children and a teacher to have chronic headaches, sore throats, sinus congestion and other problems, Mr. Smith said.

Q: Of the chateaux in the Loire Valley, are some accessible for wheelchair users?A: Here are five chateaux that provide entry to the ground floor for visitors using wheelchairs. In all of them, access to upper floors is only by stairway.* Chateau de Chenonceau has a ramp that allows wheelchair access to the ground floor. If a wheelchair user arrives by car, the staff will allow the vehicle through the gate to park closer to the chateau than is normally allowed and may provide someone to push the wheelchair.

When we bought the house we're working on now, we knew it had a few problems.A few? In Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's famous words, "Hah!"For years rain had poured and snow had sifted through the tumbled-down back wall on the third floor, slowly and surely damaging all the wood, plaster and mortar below.In fact, when you stood at the top of the stairs and looked down, the back part of the house didn't appear to be connected to the front. It was connected, of course, by the side walls; but the gap went right down beside the stairs to the ground floor.

After tropical storm Arthur fizzled, Bertha revved up the Atlantic hurricane season, then came Cristobal, with Dolly not far behind. None of the storms threatened Maryland, but that doesn't mean area homeowners shouldn't be alert and prepared. "We can get pretty much anything here in the Baltimore area," says National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Strong, who forecasts for the Mid-Atlantic region, noting that summer and early fall storms may cause no damage - or wreak havoc. Weather gurus have an idea of what's headed this way, but there's little lead time for predicting thunderstorms and specifics of hurricanes and their ilk. For hurricane activity in the Atlantic, the outlook, issued in May, points to a nearly average to above-normal season - that means a possibility of 12 to 16 named storms, including between six and nine hurricanes, and between two and five major hurricanes.

What's it like to live in a renovated rowhouse that doubles as an art gallery? For sculptor William Rhodes, who transformed an abandoned Charles Village rowhouse from top to bottom and turned it into an elegant combination living space and gallery, the answer is: Very, very cool. Rhodes, 38, is the owner of St. Paul Art & Design, a Baltimore art space that's put on at least a dozen shows by local and visiting artists since Rhodes bought the place in 2000 under a city program that helps homebuyers purchase vacant or abandoned houses.

Though most of the upper floors in the 13-story Towson office tower are empty, Pat Douglas is at work every weekday in her lonely outpost, selling greeting cards, candy and sodas to the few remaining tenants and any passers-by. Douglas has owned Pat's Kard Korner on the ground floor of the Investment Building for 20 years, and worked there for 10 years before that. But the past 13 months have been the most trying. In January of last year, more than 900 Baltimore County and state workers were moved out of the building after complaining for years about unhealthy working conditions.

Bill and Barbara Andrews, partners in The Source Unlimited, an Ellicott City interior design business, are renovating the first, second and third floors of their historic building at 8081 Main St. and will open a 19th-century English tearoom on the ground floor. The ground-floor space was seriously damaged in the 1999 fire on Main Street. Since then, The Source Unlimited has continued to occupy the second- and third-floor spaces. Now, as part of the renovations, the building's second and third floors will be expanded and a deck will be built over the Tiber River.

The Fells Point Creative Alliance will inaugurate its new performance and screening space on Oct. 7 with a screening of Lydia Douglas' "Nappy." The documentary, an examination of African-American women's relationship with their hair, will be shown at Ground Floor (the former Daily Grind building), 1726 Thames St.Alliance director Megan Hamilton is confident that the move from the group's former space, the Lodge in Highlandtown, will be good for the weekly performance series, which will now take place Thursdays instead of Fridays.

An "Old Fashioned Ice Cream Sunday" will be part of the grand opening Altieri Homes is holding from noon to 4 p.m. June 28 at River Village at Russett in Laurel.River Village is the final phase of development in the 613-acre planned community, which has 12 miles of hike/bike trails, nine tot lots, basketball and beach volleyball courts, five parks, three swimming pools and a six-court tennis complex with stadium seating.A three-level garage townhouse with 1,900 square feet, the Amanda Kristine model has a base price of $149,990.

"X Site 97" is the Contemporary Museum's latest project. Two artists, Teresita Fernandez of Miami and Quisqueya Henriquez of the Dominican Republic, will create an installation in a raw, unfinished space on the ground floor of the Alex. Brown building downtown. Their conceptual work, which involves use of color and arrangement of materials, will be seen in the context of concrete walls and floors and metal ducts.Fernandez manipulates translucent materials and employs techniques of illusion to lead viewers to question their perceptions.

Asking most drivers about a trip to the Glen Burnie headquarters of the state Motor Vehicle Administration used to be like asking Dante how he liked his trip through the Inferno.No more. Gone from the ground floor is the brown-tan-beige color scheme that could make you queasy. Eighteen months of renovation and $5 million have turned the MVA headquarters into a more civilized and organized government office.The ground floor now is a 40,000-square-foot, 42-window registration center that can handle 90 percent of ordinary transactions.

As I travel life's highways I often gaze at other people's homes and ask, "How do they vent their clothes dryer?"Getting the dryer's hot, humid exhaust and its accompanying lint out of the house has been one of my life's quests, at least during the period of my life I have spent dwelling in a rowhouse.Venting a dryer in a detached house is not a big deal. You poke the pipe carrying the dryer's exhaust out an opening in the side of the house. The ideal setup is a short, straight shot using stiff sheet metal ducting that is at least 4 inches in diameter.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke won a pair of Washington Redskins tickets from Washington Mayor Marion Barry after Baltimore's Vincent Pettway successfully defended his International Boxing Federation junior middleweight title at USAir Arena on Saturday by knocking out Simon Brown of Mount Airy.Schmoke, who had wagered a bushel of crabs, declared yesterday Vincent Pettway Day in Baltimore. He presented Pettway with a pewter plate and his manager-trainer, Mack Lewis, with a glass plate.But a bigger reward may be coming.