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With the success of its Harford County store, bridal boutique Amanda Ritchey Bridal and Beauty announced plans to open a second location in Baltimore County. Scheduled to open in late summer, Amanda Ritchey Bridal and Beauty of Baltimore will be located at 1905 E. Joppa Road. The 5,400-square-foot boutique will feature bridal attire for the bride and groom as well as a collection of social occasion, mother-of-the-bride and groom and bridal party dresses. A grand opening event is planned for October.

The sight of a forklift lowering a 9,300-pound concrete slab ontoPratt Street attracted a crowd Monday night at the Inner Harbor. Curiosity-seekers joined organizers running the first Baltimore Grand Prix as the second phase officially began in constructing the downtown race course that will be used for the Labor Day weekend event. Martyn Thake, the Baltimore Grand Prix 's director of operations, said that the first phase, resurfacing and repairing many of the city streets that will be part of the two-mile course, has been completed.

A Baltimore-based company has been selected to help Ocean City rebuild its deteriorating boardwalk starting this fall. Ocean City 's town council voted this week to accept a bid from the Louis J. Grasmick Lumber Co. of Baltimore to provide the yellow pine wood needed for the work. Grasmick submitted the low bid of $602,650 for 56,040 pieces of lumber, and it was accepted over proposals from more than a dozen other companies. Ocean City 's boardwalk reconstruction project will be carried out in two phases.

A Baltimore-based company is one of the leading contenders to help Ocean City rebuild its famous but deteriorating boardwalk. The Louis J. Grasmick Lumber Co. of Baltimore submitted the "apparent low bid" to supply lumber for the first phase of the two-year project, said Terry McGean, city engineer of the resort town. Grasmick was one of 18 companies competing to supply the yellow pine decking needed for the work, and its base offer of $602,250 for 56,040 pieces of lumber was below the city's estimate of nearly $621,000, McGean said.

The Maryland Transit Administration's proposed Red Line in Baltimore has received U.S. approval to move to the next phase of development, a strong indication that the east-west light rail line will eventually qualify for federal funding. Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to announce Tuesday that the Federal Transit Administration has given the state the green light to move into what is known as preliminary engineering, or PE — a phase that would take the project beyond the conceptual stage and into specific planning.

Tickets to the 2012 Olympics in London are now available, marking the first opportunity for fans of Michael Phelps and other athletic luminaries to secure their seat for next year's global competition. The Olympics begin in just about 500 days and tickets went on sale about mid-day Tuesday with organizers offering more than 6.6 million tickets - about 58,000 available initially in the U.S. - to some 650 competition sessions. This is just the first phase and people can apply for tickets through April 26. Tickets are not being sold first-come, first-serve, however.

At 46, developer Harold Dawson Jr. is young enough that sitting at a lunch counter was not a civil right that he had to fight for, but a battle already won by his parents' generation. But the developer, who is black, says the victory is why he needs to move forward with plans to rebuild the blighted block on downtown Baltimore's west side where one such lunch counter sit-in took place. Rather than destroying the legacy of the 1955 protest, as some have argued, Dawson says the project will honor it by bringing new life to the area.

State and local officials joined Shaun Donovan, the nation's top housing official, on a tour Friday of construction efforts that they hope will give residents of a blighted corner of West Baltimore affordable and environmentally minded housing. The development, which aims to renovate or build 111 low-income apartments by the end of this year, is in the Poppleton neighborhood, where boarded-up buildings sit alongside tidy, well-kept homes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provided $1.5 million of federal stimulus funding to outfit apartments in the development with features that include double-pane windows, cabinets free of formaldehyde and energy-efficient appliances.

The federal government on Monday invited bids from wind power developers to place turbines off Maryland's coast, taking the first step toward what could be the nation's largest offshore commercial wind project to date. The Department of Interior identified a 277 nautical-square-mile area off the state's 31-mile coast for possible leasing, largely accepting the recommendations of a state task force that has been studying offshore wind prospects since early this year. The turbines nearest to shore could be placed 10 nautical miles off Ocean City and 20 nautical miles off Assateague National Seashore.

For the past 15 years, Carlton "Bub" Carrington has championed Baltimore's basketball scene. In his role as the president, general manager and coach of the Nike Baltimore Elite AAU program, Carrington said he has seen the city's hoops talent get overlooked on a regular basis. By now, he's gotten used to those slights. "It's not even just basketball," Carrington said. "Everybody skips over Baltimore. If you look at the Weather Channel, they skip over Baltimore. Entertainers skip from Philly to D.C. Baltimore gets no love.