Parking Garage

A Virginia-based developer's quest to build a parking garage at 18 W. Saratoga St. received a key endorsement Thursday when Baltimore's Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel gave "revised schematic approval" to the latest design for the project. The plan by David and Richard Hillman of Southern Management Corp. calls for a 12-level, 375-space garage to be buried mostly underground, with just 24 spaces above street level. The top of the building would be 26 feet above the sidewalk.

Baltimore officials hope to draw more money from city-owned garages downtown, raising rates at garages on Caroline, Baltimore and West streets while adding a new monthly overnight plan at the St. Paul Street garage. The city's Board of Estimates is set to vote Wednesday on the proposal, which officials say is necessary to maintain the parking facilities. The Parking Authority of Baltimore City, which recommended the increases, said the new, cheaper option on St. Paul Street will make parking more affordable for people who live nearby.

A new parking garage will open Monday at The Fitzgerald at UB Midtown in Baltimore as the first completed phase of the $76 million mixed-use apartment project, developer the Bozzuto Group said Wednesday. The 1,245-space garage, adjacent to the University of Baltimore, will increase public parking in the Mount Vernon neighborhood and serve the university, cultural venues and residents of the Fitzgerald, which will have 275 luxury apartments and street-level shops including a Barnes & Noble College Booksellers Superstore.

Editor: There was a serious lack of monitoring at the Bel Air parking garage on Jan. 24, when I served my calling to be on the jury panel. It was one of the coldest days of this year. We were dismissed at noon and I headed to the parking garage and may car on the sixth floor. I got on the elevator alone, against my better judgment. After passing the fifth floor the elevator abruptly stopped with a jolt. My first thought was panic but I chose to access the situation and I realized there was an alarm button and a telephone button.

A man was shot several times in the back just before 6 p.m. on a lower level of an underground parking garage in the heart of the University of Maryland, Baltimore and UM Medical Center campus, police said. The victim, who appeared to be in his mid-40s, is in critical but stable condition at a local hospital, said Detective Kevin Brown, a police spokesman. After the shooting, the assailant fled, he said. No description of the shooter was available last evening. Officers were still conducting an investigation of the scene an hour after the shooting, Brown said, and surveillance footage will be reviewed.

On a sunny spring afternoon, children continue a tradition in the downtown playground next to Annapolis Elementary School: shooting hoops, kicking a ball around, riding the swings. Adults, meanwhile, pursue another generations-old practice: arguing the future of the little park, long considered the keystone to waterfront revitalization. "This is as big for Annapolis as Harborplace was for Baltimore," said Alderman Ross H. Arnett III, who days ago joined a 6-3 majority voting to let the city pursue plans to wipe most parking spaces off City Dock and move them to the playground site, enabling the city to make better use of what some say is the most valuable piece of real estate in town, if not in Maryland.

A Baltimore City Police officer was shot in the leg about a block away from the Central District office Tuesday night. The officer was shot in a parking garage in the unit block of South Frederick Street, police spokesman Donny Moses said. The unidentified officer was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. His condition was not immediately available. The garage is open to the public but police officers in the Central District often use the garage, which is a block from the station, to park their off-duty vehicles.

An Ellicott City woman was assaulted Thursday by an unknown assailant while approaching her car in the parking garage at Wincopin Circle,said county police spokesman Sgt. Gary L. Gardner.Police said the man ran when the victim screamed and elbowed him in the stomach. She escaped unharmed.The woman told officers she had left the Columbia Inn and walked across the street to the garage at about 9:40 p.m. when she was grabbed from behind around the waist by a man who was hiding between two cars in the garage, police said.

Architect and scholar Shannon Sanders McDonald stepped out on a recent afternoon into a building that in her view stands as one of the most significant forms in architecture, an "It" structure, a hub around which today's urban development revolves. A nationally recognized authority on parking garages, McDonald walked from the Towson Town Center food court to Level C4 East, where she had parked her Mazda Miata. From here she would begin the tour of nearby examples of the architectural form she's been studying for nearly 20 years.

After a three-year struggle involving state officials and city merchants, the new Bladen Street parking garage is open to the public on weekday evenings and weekends, Annapolis officials announced. The 725-space garage, which was completed last month at the corner of Calvert Street, will offer free parking on weekends and from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. weekdays. Any vehicles left after 6 a.m. will be towed. Local business owners were pleased with the Friday announcement. "I think it's fantastic," said Chance Walgran, a member of the Annapolis Business Association.

At first glance, a grass-roots farmers' market in the covered parking lot of a suburban mall seems a bit incongruous. But that's the charm, and convenience, of the Westfield Annapolis Winter Farmers' Market, held every other Sunday at Westfield Annapolis Mall from January into April. Patrons can park their car, pop into Macy's to buy a Gucci handbag or designer sweater, then walk across the lot and stock up on potatoes, turnips, cabbage, eggs and chicken, or enjoy a bowl of homemade Italian chicken and vegetable soup.

The new Main Street entrance to the Bel Air Municipal Parking Garage has opened. The entrance, which is off of Burns Alley between Courtland Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, was put in to work in conjunction with the new Main Street surface lot the town opened in July on the site of the former BB&T building. Traffic that enters the Main Street lot has the option of using one of the metered spaces on the lot or, if no spaces are available or the weather is rainy or snowy, a motorist can simply drive through the surface lot, cross Burns Alley and enter the parking garage.

Baltimore's architectural review board had little to say about renderings of the proposed Harrah's Casino on Russell Street. However, the hulking parking garage sitting behind it — looming above the water, facing drivers on Interstates 95 and 395 — came in for scathing criticism. Three members of Baltimore's Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel who met with representatives of the project Thursday rejected the casino plan, saying the parking structure would mar the city's skyline.

A small fire broke out in the top floor of a five-story parking garage in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood this afternoon, according to city fire officials. City firefighters responded to the 100 block of East Read Street where they discovered heavy, dark smoke pouring from the roof. As of 1:45 p.m., firefighters had the fire under control. While there was heavy smoke in the area, no major damage was reported. No one was injured in the fire, fire officials said. Parts of North Calvert and St. Paul streets, near Read Street, were closed while firefighters were on the scene.

A Baltimore man was critically injured in a parking garage near the Columbia mall Thursday night when his van jumped a curb and struck a concrete support post, Howard County police said. About 7:09 p.m., Shmuel Yaakov Kleiner, 60, of the 6000 block of Clover Road in the Glen neighborhood of Northwest Baltimore, was driving a 2003 Acura MDX on the first floor of the parking garage at 10490 Little Patuxent Parkway when it hopped a curb and struck the post, police said. Kleiner was medevaced to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in critical condition by Maryland State Police, police said.

In the annals of civic improvements, none in Harford County has been watched as closely in recent years as the development of the new Main Street parking lot in downtown Bel Air. As chronicled in our pages, lo these many months over the past year and a half, the town finally bought the vacant BB&T building, the former home of the old Commercial & Savings Bank from back in the days when there really were local banks. With the BB&T building came an adjoining parking lot, once the site of the old Vaughn Hotel building that was demolished after the Great Bel Air Fire of 1972.

The state Board of Public Works brushed aside concerns of transit advocates and an Annapolis neighborhood group yesterday by endorsing a five-story parking garage at the gateway to the city's historic downtown. The 732-space garage, planned at Bladen and Calvert streets, has long been envisioned as a replacement for more than 400 state employee parking spots that were lost when a nearby parking lot was used for public housing. Expected to be completed in 2006, the garage will cost at least $24 million and will be paid for through revenue bonds.

Amtrak and commuter rail passengers and the countless drivers trapped in North Charles Street traffic over the past two years have reason to rejoice over today's opening of a $14 million parking garage at Pennsylvania Station.Seven months late and $1 million over budget, the tri-level facility features 550 parking spaces -- twice what has been available at the privately operated street-level lot north of the 84-year-old train depot at Charles and Lanvale streets.Not only is the garage expected to make parking more convenient, but the building's top level creates a plaza at the station's main entrance.

A developer has filed for a permit to demolish theMorris A. Mechanic Theatre, a decades-old venue that has sat unused for eight years in the heart of downtown Baltimore, and replace it with a $150 million-to-$200 million mixed-use development. OneWest LLC plans to build two 30-story towers containing 600 market-rate apartments, 150,000 square feet of retail space and an underground parking garage on the site at 1 NorthCharles St., the partnership said. "The market is ripe and the financing is available for apartments," said Howard S. Brown, a partner in OneWest and chairman and president of Owings Mills-based David S. Brown Enterprises Ltd., which is managing the development.

On a sunny spring afternoon, children continue a tradition in the downtown playground next to Annapolis Elementary School: shooting hoops, kicking a ball around, riding the swings. Adults, meanwhile, pursue another generations-old practice: arguing the future of the little park, long considered the keystone to waterfront revitalization. "This is as big for Annapolis as Harborplace was for Baltimore," said Alderman Ross H. Arnett III, who days ago joined a 6-3 majority voting to let the city pursue plans to wipe most parking spaces off City Dock and move them to the playground site, enabling the city to make better use of what some say is the most valuable piece of real estate in town, if not in Maryland.