Park Avenue

FireMount airy: Firefighters responded at 5: 01 p.m. Monday to an auto fire on Park Avenue at Route 27. Units were out 31 minutes.

FireMount Airy: Firefighters responded at 2: 12 p.m. Tuesday to a brush fire at Route 27 and Park Avenue. Units were out 18 minutes.

For decades, the four-story building in Mount Vernon was used as medical offices -- first by dentists, then psychiatrists.But when it changed hands this year, the building wasn't sold to another doctors' group, or to any other commercial interest.It was purchased by a husband and wife from Washington who are taking it back to its original use: a single-family residence.Although Paul and Susan Warren say they considered many different places to live, they were struck by the grandeur and magnificent appointments of the 32-foot-wide house at 829 Park Avenue, built in the 1870s for the family that ran the Knabe piano factory in southern Baltimore.

It was a 125 years ago today, on a hot July morning, that Baltimoreans began hearing and seeing horse-drawn fire wagons racing through city streets. Great clouds of dense black smoke rose over buildings west of Charles Street.They were responding to a fire in the workrooms of Joseph Thomas & Sons, a door and sash manufacturer at Park Avenue and Clay Street, where floor boys sweeping pine shavings noticed a wisp of smoke curling up from a shavings box near the boiler room.Stacks of lumber, varnish and glue stored in the building quickly fed the growing flames.

The Contemporary Museum has found a home in the right place, with the right space and under the right circumstances, according to its director, Gary Sangster. "It met all the conditions were looking for," he said yesterday in talking about the museum's plans.Since its debut in 1989, the Contemporary has been Maryland's "museum without walls," staging exhibitions in various locations around the region. Beginning in January, it will rent half of the first floor of the Home Mutual building at Centre Street and Park Avenue -- 3,500 square feet of space.

IS DOWNTOWN Baltimore becoming one big parking lot, or does it just seem that way?In practically every corner of the city, property owners are razing vacant buildings to enlarge parking lots or make way for new ones.The latest demolitions involve buildings in the 200 block of E. Baltimore St. and the northwest corner of Park Avenue and Franklin Street.Also slated to come down are the home of Tate Engineering Systems at West and Russell streets near Camden Yards (due to become a 437-space lot for the Maryland Stadium Authority)

Erin Tierney Kramp, 36, a venture capital investor who drew national attention with a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, died Saturday in Dallas. After her diagnosis in 1994, Mrs. Kramp began preparing for death, writing and making videos for her young daughter. Her story was featured on ABC's "20/20" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show."Besides making the videos for her daughter, Mrs. Kramp selected her burial plot and made a list of things for her husband to do after her death.The list turned into a book.

NEW YORK -- In a day of respite from the intense circumspection going on in Washington, President Clinton came to New York yesterday in pursuit of money and perhaps solace, and found some of both.Making his first trip since the release of the Starr report and accompanied by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Clinton gave a speech on the global economy and planned to circulate at three crowded Democratic fund-raisers, including an evening performance of "The Lion King."Among a populace long supportive of him, he was largely greeted with encouragement to proceed with his job, though he also encountered his share of dissidents.

Motorists and residents who have been long inconvenienced by the gaping sinkhole that opened under a busy downtown Baltimore intersection three weeks ago can begin using the area today.Department of Public Works officials plan to reopen the intersection of Park Avenue and Franklin Street in Mount Vernon this morning at 6."Everything should be done," said Kurt L. Kocher, spokesman for the department.Franklin Street was repaved and opened to traffic Thursday. The Park Avenue section was repaved yesterday.

The effects of Baltimore's week-old sinkhole are spreading.Efforts to repair the gaping, muddy crater at Franklin Street and Park Avenue are forcing city workers to close streets as far as a mile away."

An elderly man with thick glasses lugs a bag of sweet rice from a grocery store onto a rundown street. In a nearby building, a faded dragon's head grimaces in a hallway hung with yellowed photos. Across the street, a painted wall advertises "family dinners served all hours" at the long-gone China Inn. These are among the few remaining vestiges of the city's Chinatown, a Park Avenue block that once had bustling restaurants, stores and meeting halls, as well as exuberant Lunar New Year's parades.

The last big development parcel in Baltimore's superblock project would be filled with 152 new apartments, shops, some offices and a parking garage, under a proposal by a west-side property owner and a former city housing official. Baltimore Development Corp. said yesterday that it received one proposal for the block of parking lots and vacant buildings bounded by Park Avenue and Clay, Liberty and Lexington streets. The BDC, the city's development arm, had offered the site for redevelopment in April in hopes of continuing momentum in revitalizing the deteriorated heart of the city's old retail district.

STORE OPENING REGALI ACCESSORIES 328-330 Park Avenue, 410-244-5601 Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday-Saturday Shopaholics Felicia Jackson and Rolanda Hoard have such impeccable taste in gifts that their bosses and friends' husbands were always asking them for shopping help. Three years ago, they turned the hobby into an on-line accessories boutique: regaliaccessories.com. And in October, they turned the online store into a Park Avenue bricks-and-mortar shop, complete with electric blue walls and a zebra-print dressing room.

The voice of the Rev. Marion Curtis Bascom, the Baltimore civil rights leader, confidante of Martin Luther King Jr. and anti-war foe, who stepped down in 1995 after leading Douglas Memorial Community Church for 45 years, has lost none of its powerful resonance or purposefulness. Bascom, who will turn 82 in March, shows no signs of slowing down as he continues embracing new projects while caring for his ailing wife of 28 years. "I'm on the board of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, where I like promoting the story of how black and white Americans are inextricably tied together," Bascom said in an interview the other day from his Park Avenue home.

Grass is growing up through cracks in the pavement of the basketball court at Westminster City Park. The white paint on the backboards, aged by weather and time, has peeled off in spots to reveal rusty stains. One rim is bent downward at an awkward angle. The court, along with surrounding fencing that was deemed unsafe, will be reconstructed as part of a nearly $1 million enhancement of 13 area parks recently approved by the Carroll County commissioners. The $36,000 basketball court project is one of 15 park improvements and repairs subsidized by the county's 2007 share of money from Program Open Space, a state program that uses funds derived from taxes on real estate transactions to give people areas for outdoor recreation.

On July 10, 2006, ANASTASIADUBINSKAS (nee Misevicius); beloved wife of the late Antanas Dubinskas; dear sister of Pranas Misevicius of Lithuania and Ona Eimutiene; cherished aunt of Birute Mikuzis and her family. Friends may call at the family owed David J. Weber Funeral Home P.A., 5311 Edmondson Avenue on Wednesday from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M. Mass of Christian burial in St. Alphonus Church on Thursday at 10 A.M. Entombment Loudon Park Cemetery Mausoleum. In lieu of flowers contributions may be made to St. Alphonus Church, Park Avenue and Saratoga Street, Baltimore, MD 21202 or St. Agnes Hospice, 900 S. Caton Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21229.

Jerome William "Chipper" Ullrich, a retired real estate business owner, died of an infection Sunday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Timonium resident was 90. Born in Baltimore and raised on Patterson Park Avenue, he attended St. Katherine of Siena Parochial School and was a 1934 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School. At age 15, after his father's death, Mr. Ullrich helped his mother operate a confectionery store at Patterson Park Avenue and Oliver Street. He later worked at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant and for the S.J. Stackhouse real estate firm before opening J.W. Ullrich Realtor Inc. at Belair Road and Brendan Avenue.

How the Rich Get Thin: Park Avenue's Top Diet Doctor Reveals the Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling Great By Jana Klauer, M.D. St. Martin's Press/$22.95 This book tells us how the super-rich get thin. The problem: Most of us would end up in the poorhouse if we tried to follow some of the advice. Dr. Jana Klauer takes us inside what she calls the "Park Avenue mindset" to show how wealthy people stay skinny. The diet is unremarkable -- maybe a bit heavier on calcium-consumption than most.

On January 6, 2006, CHARLES of Westminster; beloved husband of Martha F. Polanskas and the late Martha Rose Polanskas (nee Jarkiewicz); devoted father of Constance U. Dillon and Pauline P. Morrison. Also survived by four grandchildren and three great grandchildrne. Requiem Mass will be held at St. Bartholomews Catholic Church, Park Avenue, Manchester, MD, Tuesday 10 A.M. Interment Holy Cross Cemetery. Friends may call Monday 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 at the Eline Funeral Home, 934 S. Main Street, Hampstead, MD 21074.

Two years after a Washington-based developer bought Baltimore's long-vacant Brexton apartment building with the idea of converting it to a new use, a key city agency has approved plans for its restoration. Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, a division of the city Planning Department, approved this month a proposal by Park Avenue LLC to convert the six-story building to upscale condominiums. Designed by Charles Cassell in the Queen Anne style and located at 868 Park Ave., the Brexton is one of the city's most distinctive buildings - triangular in plan, with elaborately decorated windows, intricate roof forms and turrets like those on a castle.