Park Circle

SIX YEARS ago, in a moment that will live in the annals of self-induced depression, I took a walk along lower Park Heights Avenue and started computing the decay of a community. I should have brought an adding machine. In the nine blocks above Park Circle, there were 42 abandoned, boarded-up dwellings. As everybody knows, you put one boarded-up house in a neighborhood, it's an eyesore. You leave it there, it becomes emblematic: of neglect, of breakdown, of a place where nobody wants to live.

On a cold morning at 6:45, Vanessa Jones stands alone under the canopy of the Park Circle social services center on Reisterstown Road, her cigarette providing the only light in a relentless rain. The office doesn't open until 8 a.m. But Jones is here, more than an hour early, so that she'll have a chance of getting out by 10:30 - maybe. So begins a daily dance at social services offices around the city. In these days of welfare reform, of boasts that the rolls are down and employment is high, a Muscovite reality still prevails in these places, where the poor seek help purchasing food, covering medical care and supporting their kids.

Another chapter was written yesterday in the remarkable roller-coaster life story of Edward R. "Slim" Butler.Butler -- a teen-age murderer who later earned a master's degree and a measure of acclaim as the builder of the Palladium catering hall in Park Circle -- was sentenced to three years and one month in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering in Baltimore.The 58-year-old entrepreneur and minister was convicted in December of illegally concealing $350,000 from creditors in his 1990 bankruptcy filing and laundering it through a variety of sources.

Tony Barnard had looked at about 50 buildings in th Baltimore region to house Nurad Technologies Inc. and he didn't want to see any more.Doing business had become unbearable at Nurad's two-building plant in Northwest Baltimore. Rain sometimes flooded one building. In the winter, workers had to negotiate sheets of ice while carrying parts of Nurad's microwave antenna systems between buildings.Barnard, Nurad's president, was about to move the company and its 70 jobs to Halethorpe. That's when his manufacturing manager suggested looking at the nearby Park Circle Industrial Park London Fog plant, which was about to close.

A developer who hopes to build a 70-acre office park in Severn wants to give motorists on Quarterfield Road the runaround.Osprey Property Group has received tentative approval from the State Highway Administration to build a traffic circle, or "roundabout," on Quarterfield Road and just west of Interstate 97.The circle -- at least two years from completion -- would provide motorists with access to Osprey's proposed office park on the north side of Quarterfield...

Sometimes the friends of Kurt L. Schmoke make trouble for him when they should simply shut up. It happens on Park Heights Avenue, in Northwest Baltimore, and in the city's Housing Department, too, and in an election year it does this mayor damage he doesn't need.In the 4300 block of Park Heights Ave., there once was a movie house called the Avalon Theatre, which closed and became radio station WSID, which later moved and left an empty shell, which has been rotting there for more than a decade.

Leslie Legum, chairman of the board of the Park Circle Motor Co., developer and philanthropist, died Monday of heart failure at Boca Raton Community Hospital in Florida, where he had a vacation home. The Pikesville resident was 83."He really had three different careers," said a son, Jeffrey A. Legum, president of Park Circle. "He had one in auto sales, truck and car leasing, and land development."The Park Circle Motor Co., which sells General Motors automobiles, was founded by Leslie Legum's father, A. M. Legum, in 1921.

An article in yesterday's Sun about the strike at the Parks Sausage Co. incorrectly described Parks as the only major meatpacker operating in Baltimore. A table of closed meatpacking plants that accompanied the story incorrectly included Saval Foods Corp. and the White Coffee Pot Commissary, which are still operating in Baltimore.The Sun regrets the errors.Managers and striking workers at Parks Sausage Co. agreed yesterday to meet with a federal mediator Monday in an attempt to end a dispute over the company's request for pay cuts and other contract concessions.

More than 100 workers continued their strike yesterday against Parks Sausage Co., Baltimore's last remaining meatpacking operation, protesting contract concessions that the company said were necessary for survival."

President Clinton's ears perked up yesterday when he heard that Raymond V. Haysbert Sr., chairman of the Parks Sausage Co., was in the room with Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke."