Pool Hall

A Randallstown businessman's proposed restaurant, arcade and pool hall on an East Baltimore block known for drug traffic will only foster more illegal activity in the area, say concerned merchants and an elected official who oppose the plan.The city's Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals has approved plans to build a two-story restaurant, arcade and office in the 2400 block of E. Monument St., and is considering allowing a pool hall there. But opposition to the project has forced landowner Noel S. Liverpool to postpone applying for permits to build, and he is considering selling the site.

They've begun shooting every night just east of Charles Village -- shooting pool.Bank shots, combination shots, scratch shots are heard routinely at 25th Street and Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore, where a 20-table poolroom opened late last month in a former print shop."

A Landover man's decision to renege on identifying his brother as the trigger man in a 1995 murder outside a Crofton pool hall is costing him eight more years in prison.Joseph L. Stewart, 22, agreed last year to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit armed robbery and to testify that his brother shot and killed a Bowie teen-ager in a Crofton parking lot in March 1995 while he and a friend waited. In exchange, he was to get a five-year prison term to finish after he completed an eight-year federal prison sentence for unrelated crimes.

MY BASEMENT began a new phase of its life this week. I'm still recovering from the experience. It took the first step toward becoming a family recreation room.Like most guys, I regard my basement as a sanctuary from domestic order, a place where you should be able to keep, in piles, stuff that other adults regard as junk.Stuff like the mirror from the old convertible you sold 15 years ago. You keep the mirror because it'll come in handy when you again ride around town with the top down on your sports car and no chores on your horizon.

At the end of each day, Paul Hill would come home, slip out of his day clothes and into some of the finest garments sold in Baltimore -- complete with two-tone shoes and cowhide carrying case.An evening at the pool hall awaited him. The carrying case was for his pool cue."This is what he did every day. Every day. My father was a pool shark," said his daughter, Marilyn Jean Carroll. "He shot pool real well and hustled with his pool stick."Mr. Hill, who died Tuesday at 74 of cancer at the Perry Point Veterans Affairs Hospice in Perryville, was a trash collector for the city sanitation department for 30 years.

Two Carroll County men are facing multiple charges stemming from an argument that began in a Westminster pool hall Saturday night and ended with gunshots and a car crash.Westminster police officers arrested Scott I. Hayes, 31, of the 100 block of Franklin Ave. in Sykesville, and Brian E. Jahnigen, 19, of the first block of Sullivan Ave. in Westminster.In charging documents, police said two men began arguing with three men and a woman at a pool hall on Route 27 and that all six were ordered to leave.

There was a time when almost all pool halls were the same -- seedy, smoky places filled with local riff-raff and juvenile delinquents who were up to no good. No "respectable" person would be found in a billiard parlor. You wouldn't take a date to the local pool hall, and certainly not your children.Ladies and gentlemen would not shoot pool. Only men with colorful nicknames who smoked fat, smelly cigars would shoot pool.Check out the pool halls of the '90s, and you'll see that times have changed.

The eight balls ricocheted and rolled along the green felt pool tables, dropping into pocket after pocket.It was a demonstration of geometry in motion at the Champions Billiards Cafe in Laurel last week when 100 Atholton High School students visited the pool hall with math teachers Kevin Giffhorn and Nancy Holly for a little applied mathematics."

Anne Arundel County police are looking for a man who shot and killed a 16-year-old Bowie girl outside a Crofton pool hall Monday night.Catherine Elizabeth Webster died at Prince George's Hospital Center late yesterday morning. She had been shot once in the head, police said.Miss Webster and two Bowie men, ages 18 and 19, drove to Crofton Billiards about 11 p.m., but found that it is closed Mondays. The pool hall, in the Priest Bridge Center in the 2100 block of Defense Highway, also is known as Chalk Talk, police said.

All these years later -- almost 40 years later -- the guys from the pool hall showed up again, and they were all young, good-looking and lean, and some of them sexy in that 1950s Sal Mineo-James Dean way. Here they were again, the boys from Benny's, bending over pool cues, hovering over cards, all brought to life when a fellow named Mike Lang decided to print some photographs he'd snapped in 1957 on a Leica 3C.Amazing. Lang, who was born in 1942, had contracted polio when he was 7. He took up photography as a way of getting in touch with the world.

A 54-year-old businessman, found bound by zip ties inside his Canton vending machine business last month, has died after being taken off life support, and police said Wednesday that homicide detectives are investigating. Constantine "Dino" Frank of Baldwin, who also owned pool halls and shopping centers in Baltimore County, was discovered July 29 in the vestibule of Precision Vending, in the 1000 block of S. Lakewood Ave., face-down and bound. He had managed to get one hand free, but suffered a stroke during the ordeal, according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

An Ellicott City pool hall's owners were fined $1,000 for allowing drinking after the legal closing time, and a Jessup tavern owner got a $400 penalty for allowing an underage patron to drink. Sue Yim, Hyon Lee and Haeng An, the licensees of the Centennial Que and Karaoke Club in the 10000 block of Baltimore National Pike, received the larger fine from the county's Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board for an incident March 17 in which five county police cars and liquor inspector Detective Martin Johnson responded to a fight on the parking lot just before closing time.

Peter A. Palaigos, former owner of the popular Pete's Place pool hall in Annapolis, died Monday of Parkinson's disease at his Annapolis home. He was 84. Mr. Palaigos' establishment started out as Brunswick Billiards but became widely known as Pete's Place during the 40 years he ran it at 163 Main St. In a 2000 article in The Sun, former patrons recalled a diverse clientele of local teenagers, lawyers and midshipmen who enjoyed games of pool and kosher...

Man fatally shot in West Baltimore An unidentified man was fatally shot in the 1600 block of Vincent Court in West Baltimore yesterday morning. Police responded to a call about a shooting about 2:30 a.m. Officers arrived to find a victim suffering from multiple gun shot wounds. The victim was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was pronounced dead at 2:52 a.m. Police said yesterday that they had no suspects or motives. Madison Park Fire damages Dundalk pool hall A two-alarm fire seriously damaged a popular pool hall in Dundalk about 9:30 p.m. yesterday.

Former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts, clad in a straw cowboy hat with a sweat-drenched red bandanna around his neck, commands center stage at the Recher Theatre, frenetically soloing as his band rolls though his timeless "Jessica." Tie-dyed teenagers and older fans in polo shirts sway as a unit to the dips and peaks of Betts' effervescent guitar work, which fills the converted movie theater's expansive concert hall. Betts, who with his band Great Southern played the Recher last weekend - followed a night later by Nils Lofgren of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band - is among a roster of music legends and rising stars who have performed there in recent years.

A group playing cards at a Pasadena pool hall were robbed early Monday when masked gunmen crashed the game and took their cash, Anne Arundel County police said. About 3:45 a.m., four men brandishing a machine gun and several pistols walked into Star Billiards and began barking orders at the group and a few others playing pool, said police spokesman Lt. Joseph E. Jordan. After cash, cell phones, jewelry and other personal property were taken, the victims were moved into the rear of the hall, where they were told to lie on the floor or to get into a closet, Jordan said.

THE AIR is smoky. Twenty or 30 folks, mostly middle-aged men in jeans or sweat pants, stand casually around the tables between the occasional family and, always, the several elderly regulars who spend most of their waking hours here. Teens sometimes show up to play, but generally the pool hall feels like Adults Only. Pool is a game for thinkers. The pool ball, depending more or less on the age and condition of the walls of the table (and the presence or absence of spin), will bank in a line that is symmetric to a line perpendicular to the wall.

Michael Lang grew up in the 1950s fascinated by the cool guys with slicked-back hair and cigarettes dangling from their lips who hung out at Benny Kitt's pool hall in West Baltimore. Lang wasn't one of them, but as a teen-ager he found a way into their world through his camera - an old Leica with a fast lens that allowed him to take moody, atmospheric, film noir-like photographs of the characters he encountered in Benny's dark, smoky interior. The photographs went into a box and stayed there until 1995, when Lang, by then a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, looked at them again and realized he had unwittingly captured a pungent and historically important slice of Baltimore's storied past.

For almost 50 years, Pete's Place on Main Street in Annapolis was the place to go to meet friends, shoot some pool, have a beer. The clientele ranged from local teen-agers to lawyers to midshipmen. "Admiral" David Robinson, a Naval Academy graduate turned pro basketball player, and Napoleon McCallum, a midshipman who went on to a career in the National Football League, are said to have shot a few games at Pete's during their days in Annapolis. The billiard hall-turned-restaurant shut down almost six years ago and another tavern took over, but people haven't forgotten Pete's Place.

A Randallstown businessman's proposed restaurant, arcade and pool hall on an East Baltimore block known for drug traffic will only foster more illegal activity in the area, say concerned merchants and an elected official who oppose the plan.The city's Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals has approved plans to build a two-story restaurant, arcade and office in the 2400 block of E. Monument St., and is considering allowing a pool hall there. But opposition to the project has forced landowner Noel S. Liverpool to postpone applying for permits to build, and he is considering selling the site.