Midtown

The owner of a vacant nine-story office building at 11 E. Chase St. in Midtown-Belvedere is seeking city approval to convert the property to 56 apartments. A group called Daejan 11 E. Chase LLC, represented by Samuel Monderer, has applied to Baltimore's Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals to convert the historic Algonquin building to residential use. Monderer also controls the neighboring apartment building at 1010 St. Paul St. and a parking lot between the two buildings. A zoning board hearing has been set for Tuesday.

The University of Maryland Medical System is planning to build a $50 million ambulatory care center, for outpatient services, on the campus of Maryland General Hospital. Initial plans for the seven-story structure were revealed at the city's architectural review board Thursday, said Mark Wasserman, senior vice president for external affairs and development for the medical system. The building will be constructed on a now vacant lot at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Linden Avenue in midtown Baltimore, he said.

IN RECENT DECADES, the people of Baltimore have done amazing things in building and rebuilding large parts of their city. Baltimoreans have created big new wonders like the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards. They have restored old wonders like Fells Point and Otterbein. Now they're at it again. This time the action is in Midtown, the center-city district that includes Bolton Hill and Mount Vernon, Charles North and Madison Park. The four Midtown neighborhoods are proud, lovely places, each with a long history of resisting urban decay and salvaging urban delight.

Tribeca Coffee is open in Mid-Town Belvedere. "We are here!" said owner James Jeon. Jeon said he wants to attract students from the nearby campuses of the University of Baltimore and the Maryland Institute, College of Art.  He also wants to draw in coffee enthusiasts and develop some new ones, too. You can tell Jeon's serious. He's brought in beans from PT's Roasting Co. of Topeka, Kan. and he's invested in top-notch equipment like a Mahlkonig grinder, a Synesso espresso maker and a Diedrich roaster for in-house roasting.

Another large swath of Baltimore could have a special tax to pay for private security patrols and street sweepers under a bill introduced last night before the City Council.The proposed special taxing district in the city's midtown area could become the third in the city in the past three years -- and would link similar districts in the downtown business section and Charles Village area.Its boundaries are roughly Centre Street on the south, 20th Street on the north, the Jones Falls Expressway on the East and Howard Street and Eutaw Place on the west.

The nation's oldest black-oriented newspaper will move its headquarters to a midtown Baltimore Charles Street location by the first of the year, the president of the Afro-American Co. of Baltimore City Inc. said yesterday."

Developers of a proposed $75 million luxury apartment building in midtown Baltimore have secured financing and started construction on the project near the University of Baltimore. The Bozzuto Group, which will develop and manage the Fitzgerald at UB Midtown in a venture with the university and other partners, said yesterday that it obtained a $52 million construction loan from Bank of America and RBS Citizens and $23 million in equity funded by the New York State Teachers' Retirement System.

Stan Smith removes his Omega watch and billfold, the last of his valuables. The alarm system is activated. Only then does he venture beyond his rowhouse, avoiding alleys and strangers, for a pleasant evening jog on the streets of Bolton Hill.It's not like it used to be when the 54-year-old high school teacher grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, where front doors were left unlocked. "It's more of a comment on society as a whole," he said. "It's not only in the city."Smith and others in his neighborhood thought their fears would be allayed when they agreed two years ago to pay a surcharge tax for the creation of the Midtown Community Benefits District, carved in the heart of Baltimore to address issues of grime and crime.

SPECIAL BENEFITS TAX districts are nothing new for Maryland. They have been around since 1929 in Anne Arundel County, where 14 new taxing districts have been created in the last six years. But the situation there is different from Baltimore, which only has two such districts, with voters currently deciding in a mail-in referendum whether to add a third.In Anne Arundel, the best way for many waterfront communities to pay to maintain roads and piers is by placing a special tax on themselves.

Once-rundown multi-unit apartments, rentals and offices are returning to their original use as single-family homes along the 1000 and 1100 blocks of N. Calvert St. With the help of a local nonprofit group, some homebuyers are finding that Baltimore's midtown area offers historic houses and likely tax incentives and low-interest loans for those willing to put in the time, money and effort to renovate. The 4,000-square-foot, three- and four-story homes along the two-block stretch of North Calvert have distinct architectural detail.

The Potbelly Sandwich Shop on Charles and Biddle streets that passersbys have been gaping at is opening Tuesday. Potbelly, which promotes itself as a "mealtime hangout spot," has existing Baltimore locations in the Inner Harbor and Downtown West as well ones in Towson, Annapolis and Hanover. The Midtown-Belvedere store is at 1201 N. Charles St. It will be open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. For information call 443-278-8752 or go to potbelly.com And on March 26, another Potbelly will open in Charles Village , on the corner of St. Paul and Biddle streets.

Dionysus has closed in Midtown-Belvedere. Full disclosure: For a few years, Dionysus was my favorite bar. Dionysus opened on Preston Street in late 2003.  It was a good run. There were ownership and staff changes. I'm not sure what happened at the end. But it's definitely closed, informed sourcees assure me. Stay tuned. Good chefs came through, like Jeremy Price, now at the Creative Alliance's Marquee Lounge , and Shawn Lagergren, who owns the Cajun spot Tooloulou in Lauraville.

A Baltimore Circuit Court judge's decision to void the proposed $1.5 billion public-private partnership to redevelop the State Center office complex in Baltimore puts the state in a severe bind. It now faces both the immediate, practical concerns about how to replace aging and inadequate office space that is increasingly expensive to maintain, and the broader implications of a ruling that could, theoretically, put at risk other public-private partnerships that are under way or in the works.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that 12 new surveillance cameras will be installed along Charles Street in Midtown. "The CitiWatch program is a vital part of Baltimore's effort to reduce violent crime in our neighborhoods. The cameras serve as a force multiplier that enables the men and women of the Baltimore Police Department to do more to protect the citizens of this great city," Rawlings-Blake said in a statement.  The cameras, funded by the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention and grants from the Abell Foundation, stretch from the Washington Monument to 20th Street, and bring the number of cameras in the city's network to 622, officials said.

The Baltimore Business Journal is reporting that a Potbelly is headed to Midtown-Belvedere. The location, at the northeast corner of Charles and Biddle streets, is the southern anchor of a ground-level retail strip that already includes a Starbucks, Chipotle and Tutti Frutti. The address, 1201 N. Charles St., was the longtime home of Danny's , a fine dining restaurant that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. The corner building has been remodeled and no remnants remain of Danny's, inside or out. Final details are still to be worked out, the Baltimore Business Journal says . If Potbelly does move in, there would be eight locations in the Baltimore area for the Chicago-based franchise, which began in 1977 in a small antique store that offered homemade sandwiches to its customers.

Rookie Baltimore police officers Jason Dipaola and Steven Vinias were sent to Mount Vernon to provide a sense of security to a neighborhood shaken by a double shooting. They may have ended up solving the case. After stopping a group of young people drinking alcohol at a park near the Washington Monument, the officers found a man carrying a rusty .22-caliber revolver with an obliterated serial number. Police said Thursday that subsequent information helped them connect the man, a 25-year-old drifter from North Carolina, to the double shooting.

Maybe it was the baggy white pants decorated with jalapenos that made Mark Tilley stand out among fellow chefs. Maybe it was his signature dish, a twist on crab cakes -- a recipe he kept secret even from his grandmother. Tilley, the 31-year-old assistant chef at the Country Club of Maryland on Stevenson Lane in Towson, was shot and killed Wednesday night at his midtown Baltimore apartment in the 1600 block of St. Paul St., apparently by someone who broke in and confronted him in his living room.

The Eager House, a popular midtown dining spot for many years before closing in the mid-1980s, may reopen soon.Ernest L. Murphy, a Columbia resident, heads a group that has asked the city liquor board to grant a new license as part of its plan to reopen the restaurant at 13-15 W. Eager St. The liquor board will hold a hearing on the application at 11 a.m. next Wednesday on the second floor of City Hall.If it reopens, Eager House will be one of several downtown or midtown restaurants targeted for a revival.

Baltimore police on Sunday released photographs of the two victims in a fatal double shooting in the city's Mid-Town neighborhood on Friday, hoping the images might help an investigation that had so far produced few leads. Joseph Alexander Ulrich, 40, of Baltimore, who went by Alex, was killed in the shooting, and Lawrence Peterson, 56, owner of the Empire House inn and a well-known leader in the neighborhood, was critically injured. In recent years, police have rarely released the identity — much less the image — of non-fatal shooting victims.

A shooting early Friday outside a small inn and residence next to the Belvedere Hotel in the Mid-Town neighborhood left a 41-year-old man dead and another critically wounded, police said. The wounded man was identified by Mount Vernon-Belvedere Association President Jason Curtis as 56-year-old Lawrence R. Peterson, the owner of the Empire House inn. Peterson is a well-known booster for the Mount Vernon area who is regarded by residents as its unofficial mayor. Friends also confirmed that Peterson was wounded.