Neighborhood

Greg Cantori plans to downsize when he retires. Really, really downsize. His retirement home is 238 square feet — one-tenth the size of the average new American house — and sits in his Anne Arundel County yard. He and wife Renee can hitch it to a truck and take it with them wherever they go. "It's so cheap — that's what's so cool about this," said Cantori, 52, who envisions a surf-and-turf future, alternating between the house and a sailboat. "We bought the house for $19,000.

Roaming the streets that encircle Pimlico Race Course , I discovered so many places that I had trouble going back to the same locale twice. Outer Northwest Baltimore is a fascinating, at times geographically bewildering, place. When the Maryland Jockey Club members built Pimlico, they must have been thinking big and distant. It was a gallop from Druid Hill Park, and if you didn't own a carriage, you would have needed a ticket on the Western Maryland Railway to spend a day at the races.

You take your good news where you get it and here's mine: the Preakness sent Kegasus packing. You remember Kegasus. Sleaze-ball centaur with the biker haircut and beer gut? Budweiser-swilling centerpiece of the Infield Fest ad campaign the past two years? Gone. Got the proverbial pink-slip. You won't see him Saturday for the 138th Preakness Stakes. "He went back to the islands and I haven't seen him since," Maryland Jockey Club president Tom Chuckas joked the other day. Good thing.

Police are investigating an overnight shooting that left one man wounded, while detectives continue to search for suspects in the separate beating of a man Thursday evening that left him in critical condition. Police responded to Harbor Hospital at 12:50 a.m. after a gunshot victim had walked in for treatment. The man told investigators he had pulled into a lot between the 2400 block of Maisel Court and the 2400 block of Wilgrey Court in the Westport neighborhood to say hello to a friend of his cousin when an unknown suspect shot at him numerous times.

Always, there were those lovely old country estates and gracious manor taverns with roaring fireplaces, but in the old days fine dining was associated with the city. Not so anymore. Now, there are more compelling reasons than ever for diners to cross county lines for a good meal. The 50 best county restaurants in Howard County, Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County is a mix of the old and the new, destinations for special occasions and joints for Monday night suppers, the chef-driven and crowd-pleasing.

A 20-year-old cousin of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was one of two men fatally shot in separate incidents Wednesday night in Baltimore, the latest victims of the city's relentless pace of gun violence. Joseph Haskins, 20, was shot inside a house just blocks from his family's home in the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Forest Park. Police said the shooting appeared to be the result of home invasion robbery, but detectives still were investigating. They said it was unclear whether Haskins was targeted.

Company's coming to Pimlico Race Course . For the throngs expected at Saturday's Preakness, the hospitality team at Pimlico Race Course is bringing in 7,000 pounds of crab meat and 3,000 pounds of aged tenderloin. Did someone remember to get ice? Yes: 30,000 bags of frozen water are already in place. Those were just a few of the items on the Preakness list of Tommy Inzer, director of hospitality for the Maryland Jockey Club, which has been hosting the Preakness since 1873.

Roaming the streets that encircle Pimlico Race Course , I discovered so many places that I had trouble going back to the same locale twice. Outer Northwest Baltimore is a fascinating, at times geographically bewildering, place. When the Maryland Jockey Club members built Pimlico, they must have been thinking big and distant. It was a gallop from Druid Hill Park, and if you didn't own a carriage, you would have needed a ticket on the Western Maryland Railway to spend a day at the races.

Tucked away near the western edge of Baltimore, the neighborhood of Hunting Ridge is full of charm. Stone, brick and wood homes are nestled on nice-sized woodsy lots along winding streets and backed by beautiful parkland. "It's beautiful and cozy and hidden," said David McDonald, president of the Hunting Ridge Community Assembly. "It's the best neighborhood in Baltimore." Bordered by Cooks Lane, Edmonson Avenue, Swann Avenue and Leakin Park, the neighborhood is diverse, easily accessible and, according to its residents, is one of the city's best-kept secrets.

Regarding the protests held in front of the Baltimore Circuit Court over the alleged beating of a black teen-ager, Nick Madigan wrote in his article ("Protesters gather as brothers plead not guilty in assault case," Feb. 17) that the boy was beaten, "as he walked through their neighborhood. "  Since when does any racial or ethnic group own a neighborhood?  Further, the Werdesheim brothers do not live in the neighborhood where the incident occurred.  In fact, they live in racially mixed neighborhoods with a crime rate way below just about any neighborhood in the city — as many Jews in Northwest Baltimore do. That is probably due to the great work of volunteer patrol groups such as Shomrim and the Northwest Citizens Patrol.

A driver of a suspicious vehicle in the Cedarday neighborhood in Bel Air last month turned out to be a grandmother dropping off her children from school, not someone trying to lure children into her car, according to police. When doing a patrol check of the community around 3 p.m. Friday, deputies saw the vehicle described by witnesses - a gold Honda van. Deputies spoke to the driver, who told police she picks up her grandchildren a few days out of the week and drops them off at a home in Cedarday, according to a press release Wednesday afternoon from the Harford County Sheriff's Office.

Homicide detectives were notified late Tuesday night about a man shot multiple times in the Barclay neighborhood of Baltimore, city police said. The man was shot in the 200 block of East 22nd Street, police said. Further information about what led to the shooting or the man's identity was not immediately available. cwells@baltsun.com twitter.com/cwellssun

If indecent exposure laws aren't enough to give adventurous Pimlico infield visitors pause, here's another disincentive: The famous race course lies inside of one of Baltimore's statistical hot spots for gonorrhea. Just in time for the end of national STI Awareness Month (and, unintentionally, in time for the start of the Triple Crown at the Kentucky Derby on Saturday), staff recently added a set of maps to the city's STD page, showing Baltimore ZIP codes' rates for chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis in 2012.

As many times as it rolls around, I never outgrow the FlowerMart, which opened Friday and runs through Saturday. It's held in May and timed to take advantage of the best part of Maryland's spring. Any event that draws so many families, especially babies in strollers, mothers and grandmothers, to a hallowed Baltimore neighborhood gets my vote, even if, truth be told, I am not much of crab cake fancier. Mount Vernon has long fascinated me. I was not long free of those baby carriages when I was taken along Charles Street and spied an exotic retail mix of first-floor and basement-level shops selling old maps, rare clocks, books, antiques or other items not found at Woolworth's.

I showed up at the door of a Greenway home I've admired for years. Charles B. Reeves — who goes by "Sprat" — greeted me with his enthusiastic welcome: "Delighted. " For the next 90 minutes I tried to take notes about his version of the history of North Baltimore's Guilford. "I was born in 1923. Huzzah!" said the neighborhood patriarch. I posed a few questions about Guilford's centennial, an event that is being celebrated Sunday with a house and garden tour. Who else but this retired Venable attorney, fox hunter and Austrian skier could tell me where the bodies were buried?

Frank Bond Sr., a retired Maryland Transit Administration bus driver and neighborhood activist who believed in the value of education, died Monday of colon cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. "Frank was a wonderful man who treasured education even though he was not an educated man," said W. Byron Forbush II, who retired in 1998 after 38 years as headmaster of Friends School. "His three children went to Friends as well as two grandchildren," said Mr. Forbush. "He was so devoted and proud that his family was part of that institution.

The townhomes have the amenities of some of Baltimore's high-end neighborhoods - exposed brick, granite counter tops, trey ceilings and soaking tubs - but they're located in an area trying to leave its violent drug past behind. Just a few years ago, the homes located in the Oliver neighborhood in East Baltimore were vacant hulks where drug dealers would loiter on the steps. Then a developer stepped in and renovated 14 buildings along two blocks with environmentally friendly features.

It started about 30 years ago — no one seems to recall the exact date — when three men who'd grown up together in Pigtown took a vacant lot at the corner of Ward and Bayard streets, sank two metal pegs into the ground and started tossing horseshoes back and forth. None of the three — not Roy Whitney, not his cousin Emory Green, not Emory's little brother, Leon — had a clue they were founding a tradition. "We started playing for the fun of it, then word got around, people started coming from other neighborhoods, and it kept on growing," Leon Green, 62, said Saturday afternoon as rhythm and blues music, the smell of burgers on barbecues and the "clink" of horseshoes filled the air at the First Annual Horseshoe Tournament at the Pit In Pigtown.

A medic unit that had rushed to the scene of the midday shooting in Belair-Edison sat idling in the street. With the dead man's body under a sheet, there was no one to transport. Word was spreading about 49-year-old Kelvin Moyd's being shot. Relatives came running down Pelham Avenue, visibly upset and too frantic to cry. Two women burst through crime scene tape. One was bear-hugged by a male officer, who had other officers come to his aid as he struggled to keep her back. Then a man came down the street and a group of people swarmed him before he could confront an officer.

With the city putting together a plan for adding 10,000 families to Baltimore, this is a good time for interested Baltimoreans to weigh in. I'm told that the plan will be driven by the best possible data - a great place to start. But the plan needs to address a critical question: Who is going to want to live here during the next decade? Some of the trends that are driving Baltimore's nascent revival will prove almost impossible to determine based on the opinions of the city's current population, many of whom live here because of ties to family and friends or because housing is relatively affordable, not because they particularly want to live in a city.