Landmark

Landmark International Equities, a Westbury, N.Y., brokerage firm best known for taking public a company run by Oliver North, is being investigated by the National Association of Securities Dealers in the wake of running afoul of net capital requirements and quitting as a Nasdaq market maker Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.Landmark quit making markets at about 11: 30 a.m. Wednesday in seven Nasdaq-traded securities, including shares of Guardian Technologies International, whose chairman and president is North.

Richard M. Yaffe, president of Landmark Homes Inc., said yesterday that the beleaguered company is "winding down" and will cease as an active homebuilder.Yaffe, who recently split with partner Gary Houston, said the company has not filed for bankruptcy court protection and intends to complete 14 homes under construction. He said it will honor claims made by homeowners whose homes are still under warranty.Rumors that the Towson-based company, which has had a number of lawsuits filed against it, was in bankruptcy proceedings and was going out of business had been circulating in the local building industry.

The oldest building on the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus, Davidge Hall, has been designated a National Historic Landmark.The U.S. Department of the Interior last month added the Greek Revival-style building at 522 W. Lombard St. to its landmark list because of the building's significance in the history of medicine and architecture.Designations are reserved for properties that have been judged by the Interior secretary to have "national significance." About 2,000 properties around the nation have that status.

Baltimore Sun Co. officials are evaluating a bid for local newspapers in Anne Arundel and Carroll counties currently owned by Landmark Communications Inc., of Norfolk, Va. Landmark, owner of The Capital of Annapolis and the Carroll County Times, as well as other dailies and The Weather Channel, said Thursday that it has hired national investment firms to explore selling the family-owned company, either in whole or part. A business development team at the Baltimore Sun, owner of The Sun, is considering whether to acquire any of the Landmark newspapers, which also include several weeklies in Anne Arundel County.

Until last week, the defenders of the 74-year-old Randallstown Community Building were worried it might be demolished - even with its new historical landmark status. But the building's owner, Bank of America, has promised to help find a buyer who will preserve the stone building at Liberty and Offutt roads. Leaders of Fieldstone Community Group met last week with bank officials after hearing that the bank might sell the building to someone willing to pay the county's $100,000 fine for razing a landmark, said Susan Carr-Spiccioli, the group's historian.

The Merrill family said yesterday that it is transferring controlling ownership of The Capital and other newspapers to Landmark Communications Inc., ending family control of the Annapolis media company that spanned nearly four decades. As part of the deal, Landmark will swap its ownership in the Washingtonian magazine for full control of the newspaper properties. In exchange, the Merrill family will gain 100 percent ownership of the Washingtonian. Landmark, publisher of The Virginian-Pilot, owned 49.9 percent of Capital-Gazette Communications that the Merrill family did not control.

Baltimore's preservation commission took action yesterday to protect the substantially gutted Morris A. Mechanic Theatre from demolition or further alteration by voting unanimously to add it to a "special list" that gives the panel legal authority to approve or block any proposed changes to its exterior, effective immediately. Despite objections from the building's owners, the panel also voted unanimously to recommend that the 40-year-old building at 1 W. Baltimore St. be added to the city's landmark list, a second action that would give the preservation commission say over how the building could be modified.

The former home of the company that invented the Ouija board, the estate of Calvert School's first headmaster and one of the city's last Masonic temples are among 12 buildings that have joined Baltimore's official landmark list. Marking May as "Preservation Month," Mayor Sheila Dixon held a news conference Wednesday morning at which she signed legislation adding the buildings to the landmark list and opened an exhibit about them in the North Gallery of City Hall. The additions bring to 153 the number of buildings that have individual city landmark designation, a status that helps protect them from demolition or defacement.

The setup is straight out of a classic Western: Two rival gunslingers, at it for years, nervously look over their shoulders to see what's up with the new hotshot in town. Only the setting is not the Old West but present-day Baltimore. And it's not gunslingers but the city's two extant movie theater owners who are anxious. The new kid is the Landmark Theatres Harbor East, a seven-screen multiplex opening this weekend in one of the city's highest-profile new subdivisions. The two old rivals are the Senator Theatre, a 68-year-old civic jewel that narrowly escaped foreclosure this year, and the Charles, for more than two decades the destination of choice for Baltimore's arthouse-movie lovers.

Look around Baltimore and you will see a compendium of architectural styles and historic structures. From the dome of the Basilica and the Washington Monument tower to the elegant main building of the Maryland Institute College of Art and the magnificent Marburg Pavilion at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore is home to hundreds of landmark buildings that document its nearly 300-year history. Yet despite this rich architectural legacy, many Baltimore landmarks have survived the passage of time almost by accident; it wasn't until the late 1960s that serious efforts to preserve historic city structures got underway.