Office Tower

After listening to three hours of sometimes heated testimony, Baltimore's Planning Commission deferred for at least four weeks any decision on a developer's plan to acquire two lanes of Redwood Street so that he can build a 34-story office tower.The commissioners followed the recommendation of city planning director Ernest Freeman, who said both the proponents and opponents of the project made "compelling" arguments but that neither side presented a strong enough case to sway him one way or the other.

The Baltimore Ravens will soon have a new corporate perch, high atop the 28-story St. Paul Plaza office tower downtown.The city's new National Football League team intends to move its executive offices on Tuesday to the 200 St. Paul Place skyscraper, after committing to a lease valued in excess of $1 million through 2001."

A subsidiary of Security Pacific National Bank of California took a key step yesterday toward gaining control of the 16-story Redwood Tower office building, submitting the sole bid for it during a public auction.Zentac Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the bank, bid $13.05 million for the 202,400-square-foot building, which was constructed in the mid-1980s at a cost of $25 million and is 76 percent leased.The auction, by Atlantic Auctions, was a foreclosure sale on behalf of Security Pacific, which initiated foreclosure proceedings earlier this year against the owner, Redwood Tower Associates Limited Partnership.

Legg Mason Inc. expects company growth to fuel a major expansion over the next decade and is talking with city officials and developers about building - and subsidizing - new top-tier office and parking space to keep the brokerage's workers downtown. There are no plans to abandon the company's headquarters on Light Street, where about 1,600 employees occupy two-thirds of the building, according to James W. Brinkley, president of Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc., the brokerage subsidiary of Legg Mason Inc. He said the number of new jobs isn't clear.

Trying to smooth over differences with neighboring businesses, the developers of the proposed Baltimore FinancialCentre are offering to amend their plans to close a portion of Redwood Street in downtown Baltimore.Charles/Redwood Limited Partnership, the development team that wants to build a 32-story office tower at the corner of Redwood and Charles streets, is offering to narrow the project by 10 feet. Instead of taking two lanes of Redwood as the developers had asked to do, the project would take one lane.

Louisville, Kentucky.The lively city renewal stories of the late '70s and '80s have been in short supply of late, fallen victim to recession and tight urban budgets.But take heart. In Louisville, just eight blocks apart, are two projects that reflect glimmers of hope for what America's cities could be in the '90s.First, there's the remarkably user-friendly office tower just built for Louisville-based Capital Holdings, an insurance and financial service organization with $20 billion in assets.

Although there have been a spate of recent office building transactions downtown thus far in 1996, a sale involving the One Charles Center office tower won't be happening anytime soon.That's because the New York investment group that had planned to take the 22-story office building off owner Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.'s hands for $6 million has backed off, after an attorney tangentially involved with the group absconded with millions of dollars of his clients' money."It had nothing to do with the Baltimore market or the building," said Matthew Schnurr, a CB Commercial Real Estate Group director in New Jersey who was representing the buyers.

Close to 100 residents turned out last night to protest a rezoning request that would allow for new office tower construction at the junction of Route 100 and Route 103. The request before the Zoning Board applies to two residentially zoned parcels owned by Dr. Ahsan Kahn - a 17-acre parcel at the northeastern corner of the juncture and a 4-acre parcel at the southeastern corner. At last night's hearing, developer Donald R. Reuwer, who is working with Kahn, argued that the opening of Route 100 three years ago has made the parcels unfit for housing, but ideal for office development.

The fence is up and the construction crews are on the scene. After three years, work has started on Lockwood Place, a shopping-parking-office project on the Inner Harbor. The $100 million project is expected to bring restaurants and shops to Pratt Street that fit in with its retail and entertainment neighbors at the Power Plant and Power Plant Live. A top-tier office tower with water views will provide room for about 800 to 1,000 more workers in the central business district. The project has been on the drawing board since August 1998, when Baltimore City Community College chose a development group lead by Kravco Co. to lease and build on its property, now a parking lot. Other partners include A&R Development Corp.

One of Baltimore's most politically influential law firms has become the first tenant to sign up to occupy space in what could be Baltimore's tallest office building.Representatives of the law firm Shapiro and Olander announced yesterday that they have signed a letter of intent to lease two floors containing 50,000 square feet of space at One Light Street, the 44-story, $180 million to $190 million office tower that Trammell Crow Co. and Capital Guidance Corp. plan to build on the site of the vacant Southern Hotel.