Hotel

Plans to create an upscale hotel with shops and restaurants on the edge of Baltimore's Harbor East neighborhood are reinforcing city leaders' belief that the thriving waterfront community will continue to spur growth east of the Inner Harbor. A vacant cinder block warehouse at Central Avenue and Fleet Street would be transformed into a 205-room hotel with ground-level boutiques and restaurants under a plan by two area developers. Baltimore-based Chesapeake Real Estate Group LLC, a retail developer that bought the one-story warehouse in November, has teamed up with Bethesda-based Englewood LLC and could start construction as early as spring 2013, Chesapeake partner Neil J. Tucker said Wednesday.

This episode picked up right where they left off last week, with Snooks crying on the phone to Papa Polizzi, who is trying to comfort her and talk some sense into her simultaneously. The episode follows suit in being pretty serious and sad, and not very comical this week. There was a part of me that felt empathy for Snooki at that moment when she said she had realized her priorities had completely changed, and is not used to feeling left out.  On the other hand, the other three girls on the trip still went out to the club and had a blast despite feeling bad for leaving Snooki all alone in the hotel room.

An 18-year-old man was fatally shot during a fight in the parking lot of a Catonsville hotel early Sunday morning, Baltimore County police reported. Kelvin Glasgow, of the unit block of Winters Lane in Catonsville, was pronounced dead in the parking lot of the Ramada Limited Baltimore in the 6400 block of Baltimore National Pike, where the fight broke out, police said. Police arrived at the hotel at 1:33 a.m. after receiving reports of a fight and found a large crowd gathered outside, said Officer Shawn Vinson, a police spokesman.

When a guest at a Linthicum hotel tried to pay his bill Tuesday with counterfeit money, the innkeeper called Anne Arundel County police. Officers arrived shortly before noon at the Red Roof Inn, in the 800 block of Elkridge Landing Road and located the suspect on the parking lot. The smell of marijuana led officers to search the vehicle. Diarra Scott, 37, of Mount De Sales Road in western Baltimore County, was charged with drug distribution and related charges. During the search of the suspect's car, officers located more than a pound of marijuana packaged for sale and distribution and seized it along with $2,448 in U.S. currency and $640 in counterfeit currency.

The gaping holes torn into the lobby ceiling at the city-owned Hilton Baltimore last week by a torrential rainfall should be repaired by Wednesday, a hotel official said Tuesday. A heavy rain last Thursday evening — parts of the Baltimore area received nearly 2 1/2 inches between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. — caused an internal storm pipe system to fail, said Irene Van Sant, a project analysis director for the Baltimore Hotel Corp. A connection failed at the point where the building's vertical drain pipes join those that run horizontally above the lobby ceiling, she said.

David Kohlasch, a 30-year veteran of the hospitality industry, recently took the helm of an Inner Harbor landmark. Sonesta, a hotel brand relatively unknown in the Mid-Atlantic, assumed management in May of the InterContinental Harbor Court hotel, now called the Royal Sonesta Harbor Court. Before this year, the rapidly expanding brand only had a handful of properties in the United States. Its roughly two dozen hotels were concentrated in South America and Egypt. By the end of summer, Sonesta hotels will dot the eastern seaboard, nearly doubling the brand's locations.

Reading about Baltimore City's opposition to the Tremont Hotel plan reminded me of my utter disdain for the white elephant that is the city's struggling Hilton Hotel on Pratt Street ("City opposes conversion of Tremont Plaza to Embassy Suites," July 6). Every time I attend an Orioles game at Camden Yards, I can't avoid seeing the aesthetic monstrosity just beyond left field. The building's architecture makes absolutely no attempt to fit in with the surrounding structures, and the panoramic view of Baltimore from inside Camden Yards has been thrown into utter disarray since the hotel was erected.

Don't ask for a drink menu at the Waterfront Hotel in Fells Point; the popular hangout doesn't have one. The bartender will merely point to the assortment of canned beers on the wall, a ho-hum selection of been-there, done-that domestics and imports. It doesn't matter. The only list that counts at the Waterfront (which, by the way, isn't actually a hotel) is written in chalk on the bar's wall: It's a rundown of the artists scheduled to perform on the bar's typically crowded downstairs floor.

A new owner's planned conversion of the Tremont Plaza Hotel in downtown Baltimore to an Embassy Suites, a Hilton Worldwide brand, would threaten the city-owned Hilton Baltimore hotel as it struggles to reach stability following the recession, city development officials have told Hilton executives. The Baltimore Hotel Corp., which owns and developed the 757-room Hilton on West Pratt Street, said the lodging giant's plans to offer a franchise for a Hilton-branded hotel to the new Tremont owner violates the spirit of a hotel operating agreement between Hilton and the city.

The 62-year-old Odenton man who died Friday under suspicious circumstances has been identified as Richard George Bohlander. He was found at about 5:40 a.m., suffering from trauma to his upper body outside the office area of the Royal Inn hotel in the 1600 block of Annapolis Road, where he had been a resident. He died a short time later at Baltimore Washington Medical Center. Investigators are awaiting an autopsy report from the Office of the State Medical Examiner. Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective Shelly Rattell at 410-222-3458 or the Major Crimes Section at 410-222-3450.