Peabody

Peabody Heights Brewery, formerly called Charm City Brewing Company, has signed a lease this month for a bottling plant near Waverly , in the Abell neighborhood. The lease puts it one step closer to becoming the first large-scale brewery to open within city limits in over 30 years. Spearheaded by Stephen Demczuk, owner of Baltimore-Washington Beer Works, and entrepreneur J. Hollis Albert, the brewery expects to be open for business as early as May, though Demczuk says a June launch is more likely.  Peabody will have a 30-barrel brewhouse that its owners hope will eventually produce 40,000 barrels a year of several kinds of beers already made by some of Baltimore's microbrewers.

Baltimore police have released a photo of a man they believe held up a 28-year-old Peabody Institute student at gunpoint in Mount Vernon Thursday evening and forced him to withdraw money from a bank machine. Police said the attack occurred about 7:15 p.m. in the 700 block of N. Charles St., about two blocks north of the music school, which is associated with Johns Hopkins University. Police said the man was armed with a handgun and ran away after obtaining an undisclosed amount of money.

Earle Havens can almost hear their voices. Each time Havens steps inside the George Peabody Library, he senses the muted exclamations, the murmured back-and-forth of a conversation that's been going on now for more than two millennia. In one corner, there's a treatise from the third century B.C. in which Aristarchus of Samos estimated the distances between the sun, moon and earth. Across the room is an extremely rare unbound volume of Copernicus' "Revolution of the Celestial Spheres," in which the 15th-century astronomer advanced the then-heretical notion that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Mary C. Walker, a retired Peabody Institute director of alumni relations who had been a special assistant to the school's director, died of cardiovascular disease Dec. 22 at the Edenwald Retirement Community. She was 100. Her friends at the music school often said that the C in her name stood for Conservatory, not her middle name, Catherine. Born in Baltimore, she was the daughter of William W. Walker and Mary Catherine Shafer Walker. Her mother's family had a pork packing business near the Lexington Market.

Move over, Louvre. Show some respect, Basel's Bibliothek. A new exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art makes the case that two iconic Baltimore buildings can take their place in the first rank of the world's architectural gems. And that's not just the opinion of local boosters; that's the way the buildings are portrayed by an acclaimed German photographer. In "Candida Hofer: Interior Worlds," the artist's rendition of the Louvre shares wall space with her serenely elegant view of an Italian Renaissance courtroom inside the Walters Art Museum . And the world-famous Library of the Archiginnasio in Bologna, Italy, appears not one whit more luxuriously ornamental than the cast-iron fretwork adorning Charm City's own George Peabody Library.

A bearded lady, a flock of prostitutes, a machine that supposedly turns stones into bread — just a few of the off-kilter elements in "The Rake's Progress," the brilliant opera with music by Igor Stravinsky. Widely viewed as a masterwork since its premiere in Venice in 1951, but not staged with great frequency, the piece provides a vehicle for Peabody Opera Theatre's first production in the Modell Center at the Lyric. "It's exciting to help contribute to the season that is bringing grand opera back to Baltimore," said Peabody Institute director Jeffrey Sharkey.

Baltimore's opera scene takes an intriguing turn this weekend when The Figaro Project presents the premieres this weekend of three one-act works by local composers. "The goal was to give a sampling of contemporary opera, but I didn't want to overwhelm anyone," said Caitlin Vincent, a Peabody Conservatory-trained soprano who founded The Figaro Project in 2009. "I contacted composers I was interested in working with and asked for works under 40 minutes and in English. Each composer wrote his own libretto.

Donna L. Peabody, a retired florist and former Bel Air resident, died Tuesday of cancer at a hospital in Key West, Fla. She was 68. Donna Lewis Adams was born in Baltimore and raised in Hampden. After graduating from Western High School in 1959, she began her career as a florist. In 1977, she married James T. Peabody, and the couple established Flowers By Michael and Four Seasons Flowers. "We had stores in Pikesville, Overlea, Cold Spring Lane and Harford Mall," said Mr. Peabody.