Pier

Across the West River, from the Captain Salem Avery House Museum, amid the quiet splash of water against rocks, one can faintly see the Bay Bridge. At one time, visitors could enjoy this view from only the benches on a grassy area behind the 19th-century house. Now visitors to the museum can sit on a bench of its new pier and read nine new information panels, which are part of the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society's plan to provide another link between the community, the environment and history.

Frustrated by failed attempts by the Baltimore Police and Fire departments to rescue a cocker spaniel trapped under Pier Six since Tuesday, the general manager of an Inner Harbor restaurant plans to launch his own mission this morning.A four-hour rescue attempt failed yesterday when Fire Department divers, facing high tide and an approaching storm, refused to risk their lives for the black-and-white dog."They are not going underneath that pier and putting their lives in danger for a dog," said Robert Anderson, director of Baltimore Animal Control.

A Fells Point developer and campaign supporter of Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke gained boat docking rights to a popular harbor pier yesterday despite objections from area residents concerned about what might end up at the site.The Baltimore Board of Estimates agreed to lease 119 of 149 feet of docking space along a bulkhead on the west side of South Ann Street for seven years to Sewell A. "Skip" Brown III. Brown, appointed by Schmoke to Baltimore Development Corp., a nonprofit city recruiting arm, owns several companies with services ranging from transportation to real estate.

The new stewards of the Constellation say they want to tear down an information center on Pier 1 that has been roundly criticized as an eyesore and replace it with a building that offers better views of the restored warship and a new gateway to Baltimore's Inner Harbor.The Living Classrooms Foundation, a nonprofit organization that will operate the Constellation when it returns to the Inner Harbor next week after a $9 million restoration, received approval yesterday of preliminary plans for a two-story building from Baltimore's Design Advisory Panel.

At first glance, the top of a proposed addition to Baltimore's Inner Harbor looks like a pair of canvas sails billowing in the breeze. On closer inspection, it's apparent that those sails are rising above one of the piers, not the water.Did some misguided mariner make a wrong turn coming out of the HarborView marina? Was this errant schooner washed ashore in a freak squall?Not exactly. This is the design for a $40 million office and retail center, sculpted to evoke a tall ship. What resembles sailcloth is actually the curving glass shell of a nine-story tower, rising from the middle of Pier 4. On the inside would be seven levels of offices above two levels of stores and restaurant space.

Ocean Spray came into the Chesapeake Challenge as the No. 3 boat in the Super Vee class national standings, behind Pier 57 Fountain and CITGO Supergard, neither of which could keep up yesterday as the crew from California set a blistering pace through 11 laps on the Patapsco River.And, after nearly 100 miles of American Power Boat Association offshore racing, it appeared Ocean Spray had first place locked up.Supergard had retired on the fifth lap because of engine trouble, and Pier 57 had fallen far behind.

"Homicide: Life on the Street" may have been canceled, but a new television production may soon begin filming in the same Fells Point location.Baltimore housing officials have scheduled a news conference today to announce that the Rec Pier in Fells Point -- the red brick building on Thames Street that was used until recently as the main production facility for the TV drama "Homicide" -- will continue to be available for filmmaking.One possible project, industry representatives say, is a proposed six-hour HBO mini-series based on "The Corner," an account of addicts' lives by David Simon and Edward Burns that was published in 1997.

You can call him Lucky.Tired, hungry and dirty, the black-and-white mutt that spent much of the last five days under Pier Six was rescued by police yesterday morning as he doggie-paddled around Baltimore's Inner Harbor.After days of ignoring the pleas of well-meaning tourists and would-be rescuers, the dog was scooped into a 20-foot Baltimore police boat and greeted two officers from the marine unit with licks to the face and a wagging tail."I think it was so tired it finally came to us," said Officer Ian W. Cameron, of the Police Department's marine unit.

Through seven laps yesterday, the Offshore B Class powerboats raced on the edge of disaster in the Chesapeake Challenge on the Patapsco River. On the eighth lap, Dramamine and Pier 57 Fountain went over the edge.Dramamine, a 39-foot Fountain driven by Jeff Harris of Washington, N.C., tried to duck inside at Turn 2, ran up and over Pier 57 and flipped.The collision ripped the starboard quarter and part of the foredeck off Pier 57 and left propeller tracks along the hull.Both boats were in danger of sinking before they were taken in tow by rescue craft.

Doctors bury their mistakes.Architects grow ivy on theirs.That sarcastic assessment, attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, is one of the first jokes students hear in architecture school, and it may represent one of the reasons that the American landscape looks as ugly as it does.All of which makes it a pleasant surprise to see so much thought and creativity going into correcting one of the biggest architectural blunders in Inner Harbor history: the peanut butter-colored information center on Pier One.Thrown up in 1990 at a cost of $875,000, the two-story building was an aesthetic and economic disaster from the start.

Walk along the beach at Sullivan Cove in Severna Park and enjoy the serenity. You might see a heron swoop through rare Atlantic white cedar to an adjacent tidal pond. Some community residents, worried that all that could be destroyed, waged a long and expensive fight to stop three homeowners from getting permits to build piers there. The opponents did not succeed, but the debate has prompted state environmental officials to launch a review of rules covering residential pier construction, particularly in environmentally sensitive tidal wetlands.

THE PROBLEM : The roadway behind the Power Plant lacks barriers along the Inner Harbor. THE BACKSTORY: Downtown workers got a telling demonstration of how important it is to take care when driving near the Inner Harbor. On Oct. 30, eyewitnesses say the driver of a Lincoln Navigator drove at high speed down Market Place, across Pratt Street behind the Power Plant and right off the pier. The driver got himself out of the SUV, and firefighters spent the morning removing the vehicle from the water.

There are many times when fishing with kids beats fishing with grown-ups. Sure, you might spend a great deal of time baiting hooks, wiping fish slime from tiny hands and dodging the occasional incoming bobber. On the other hand, you don't have to talk about gas prices and spineless politicians while scrambling to think of a compliment for fried chicken that tastes like it came in close contact with WD-40. For me, it's no contest. Yesterday morning, as the sun was turning the Chesapeake Bay into the world's largest bowl of steaming bouillabaisse, families willingly left the protection of the cooling woods of Downs Park to take part in the Pasadena Sportfishing Group's fishing derby.

Sullivan Cove threatened by pier My family moved to Old County Road in Severna Park in 1958 and moved away in 1976. Each of my three brothers can probably tell a tale or two of some adventure that took place in or around the swamp near Sullivan Cove - muskrat hunting, losing shoes in the muck, seeing my first blue heron, ice skating on a connecting marshland. We would never have even considered building a pier across the swamp (The Sun, June 8). As kids, we would haul and dump logs to move from one pad of grass to another, but the damage to the swamp wrought by the construction of a pier can never be rectified.

Environmental activists have a new weapon in their four-year-old battle to stop homeowners in a waterfront corner of Severna Park from building private piers: a spotted turtle. The reptile - which animal conservation groups list as a "threatened" species because of its declining population - was discovered May 31 near Sullivan Cove on the Severn River, which is at the center of an impassioned and complicated land dispute that reached the highest court in Maryland. The Olde Severna Park Improvement Association Inc., the pier opponents who lost one case in December before the Court of Appeals, are trying to convince the Court of Special Appeals that the Department of the Environment erred in issuing a permit for a 410-foot walkway and 200-foot connecting pier.

Frances A. "Fran" Wilkins called the other day to talk about a recent column I had written about the fate of the old Port Welcome, the popular excursion vessel that sailed out of the Inner Harbor for nearly 30 years before being sold to new owners in Michigan in 1987. The object of Wilkins' veneration wasn't the Port Welcome, but rather the Wilson Line's Bay Belle, which she boarded each summer with her family during the 1950s. They were off on their annual voyage to Betterton and a two-week vacation at the end of July and into August at the now-demolished Hotel Rigbie.

At Consol Energy's terminal on the Canton waterfront, coal trains still arrive daily, dumping their load on a mounting stockpile that's now swollen to about a half-million tons. Beyond, on the Patapsco, a barge-mounted pile driver echoes like repetitive cannon fire, slamming 100-foot steel pilings into the river bed as the company races to make structural repairs to the port's largest coal pier. The abrupt shutdown of the 1,300-foot-long pier early this month for emergency repairs all but halted coal shipments from the port of Baltimore, where it's the second-largest export commodity.

Baltimore is preparing to sell Fells Point's landmark Recreation Pier for up to $2 million, advancing a plan to convert the historic structure into a trendy hotel. Terms of the agreement with the developer, J. Joseph Clarke, will come before the Board of Estimates for approval today - three years after the city selected a team to build at the site, which gained national fame by standing in as a police station on the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street. "It is an immense relief," Clarke said of the expected decision to move forward on the project, which residents and business owners have been anticipating for years.

Anne Arundel County environmentalists plan to keep fighting a Dobbins Island owner's pier, which they claim threatens the health of the Chesapeake Bay - even as a county panel last week denied they had the legal right to mount such a challenge. "The concern isn't just over this one pier, it's over the county's decision to allow this type of construction that could kill all this work," said Beth Lefebvre, a spokeswoman for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "If you take this one pier and magnify it up and down the coast, you could begin to realize the negative effect it's going to have on the health of the bay."

To the protectors of the Magothy River, the 200-foot-long pier jutting out from Dobbins Island is the equivalent of a finger poking them in the eye. Island owner David L. Clickner Sr. recently constructed the pier for the boats he hopes to dock at the house he hopes to build. Environmentalists are questioning why the state and Anne Arundel County would give Clickner permission to build a pier while they are appealing the zoning variances that allowed its construction. "We thought it was irresponsible for construction to move forward when the [variances are]