Industrial Park

In Baltimore City Man's body found in trash container at industrial park The body of an unidentified man who had been shot in the upper body was found yesterday in a trash container behind a candy-making firm in a Hampden industrial park, city police reported. Homicide Detective Sean Jones said an employee of a company at the Clipper Mill Industrial Park in the 1700 block of Union Ave. was about to place debris into the 4-foot-high bin about 9 a.m. when he spotted the fully clothed body.

When a Public Storage opened recently in the shadow of the Ravens' football stadium, a Baltimore official quipped that the facility could store national championship trophies. Managers of one of the first businesses to open since the city began redeveloping the Carroll Camden Industrial Park area say they are expecting a lot more business than that. The City Council approved in March an urban renewal plan that calls for an overhaul of Carroll Camden, a gritty 500-acre business park flanking Russell Street at Baltimore's southern gateway.

A developer withdrew his request yesterday for industrial zoning on a contaminated parcel of Elkridge land, a proposal that had brought the community out en masse - with signs - to protest. Peter Bosworth of the Baltimore-based Kenfield LLC had hoped to build an office and industrial park on 25 acres at Route 103 and Interstate 95. A former Superfund cleanup site, the residentially zoned property has too much arsenic, mercury and chromium in the ground for the Maryland Department of the Environment to give its approval for home building.

A developer withdrew his request yesterday for industrial zoning on a contaminated parcel of Elkridge land, a proposal that had brought the community out en masse - with signs - to protest. Peter Bosworth of Baltimore-based Kenfield LLC had hoped to build an office and industrial park on 25 acres at Route 103 and Interstate 95. A former Superfund cleanup site, the residentially zoned property is too polluted with arsenic, mercury and chromium for the Maryland Department of the Environment to give its approval for home building.

Chesapeake Biological Laboratories Inc. cut the ribbon yesterday on a $16 million plant where it will put smallpox vaccine into vials, the final step in a manufacturing process designed to stockpile enough of the vaccine to protect every U.S. civilian. The southwest Baltimore contract manufacturer, a subsidiary of Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Cangene Corp., built the 12,000-square-foot plant under a shroud of secrecy in just three months - years faster than usual for biotechnology plant construction.

SATSOP, Wash. - Like a post-industrial ghost town, the half-finished nuclear power plant is frozen in time - specifically June 1, 1983, when construction on the facility, by then millions of dollars over budget, was suddenly halted and the workers sent home. Today, two massive and never-used cooling towers loom over a 1,640-acre site that seems as uninhabited as the moon. But there is life here, the surest sign being one that announces, "Open 7:30 a.m., mocha lattes." It's no Starbucks, more of a glorified lunch wagon, but as elsewhere here in the Northwest, where there are lattes there are often high-tech workers nearby - in this case, about 200 employees of SafeHarbor.

Baltimore County and Bethlehem Steel Corp. unveiled related deals yesterday that will bring a new fire station and firefighter training academy to Sparrows Point and create a 100-acre industrial park with views of the Key Bridge. The announcements end 14 years of sometimes bitter negotiations over surplus company property that was to be turned over to the county in exchange for a lucrative tax break that took effect in 1988. While solidifying the relationship between the county and its largest private employer, the deals reflect a narrower vision for the industrial peninsula on the county's east side, where steel has been manufactured for more than a century.

Steve Smith walked into a gray, barren concrete building more than three decades ago, inexperienced in business and new to the air-conditioning industry - but youthful enthusiasm had gotten the best of him. He filled the gray building in Columbia's Oakland Ridge Industrial Park with equipment, hired workers, put two new trucks in the parking lot and, in 1968, watched his business grow. Today, Central Air Conditioning Contractors Inc. is a $15 million business with 150 employees, more than 60 service vans and nearly 2,000 customers, Smith said.

WHEN it opened in 1920, Highlandtown's Esskay plant was a miracle of artificial refrigeration surrounded by stockyards. By 1992, when it closed, the operation was outmoded. The family ownership by descendants of butcher William F. Schluderberg and pork packer Thomas Kurdle was long gone. During a ceremony yesterday, Smithfield Foods Inc. donated the 13-acre site to the Essex Community College Foundation, a non-profit scholarship fund. The vandalized and torched old plant buildings will be demolished within the next few months.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has agreed to scale back its new high-tech research park, ending a decade-long battle with neighbors who feared the development would crowd roads and damage the environment. The agreement clears the way for the research park, which is designed to bolster the west side's economy, and apparently comes in time for UMBC to meet its goal of a spring groundbreaking. Neighborhood opponents agreed to drop their legal challenges in exchange for the university's promise to limit the development to 35 acres.