Santa Fe

SANTA FE, Texas - The billboards are as yellow as a lemon pie at the Busy Bee cafe. Along their borders, signatures spell out familiar names: mayor, fire chief, police chief. And the slogan - what could be more harmless? "Santa Fe is no place for hate." But when local leaders joined Anti-Defamation League officials this month to unveil the massive signs, questions arose. "A lot of people were concerned [the signs] communicated that this is a place for hate," school Superintendent Richard Ownby said.

With more affluent buyers placing a high value on privacy, Rancho Santa Fe, a wooded community near San Diego, topped the Robb Report's annual list of top 10 places to live in the United States. The Robb Report, published by Luxury Media Corp., a privately held company based in Acton, Maine, rated communities using indicators such as median home cost, public services, educational facilities, crime statistics and recreational and cultural opportunities. Finishing out the top 10 locations were Greenwich, Conn.

A man was shot by off-duty city sheriff's deputies in East Baltimore last night during a holdup that took place a block from a Fraternal Order of Police union meeting on Pulaski Highway near Clinton Street.Police said three armed robbers entered the Me Too bar in the 3200 block of Pulaski Highway about 8: 50 p.m. and announced a holdup. In the tavern were three customers and two bar employees. All of them fled. The employees ran to a nearby tavern -- Looney's Santa Fe -- where about a dozen off-duty deputies from the Baltimore sheriff's office were holding an FOP meeting.

Georgia O'Keeffe was a native of Wisconsin, but she loved the Southwest and eventually made it her home. She first visited Santa Fe, N.M., in 1917 and by 1929 had begun spending part of each year in New Mexico. From 1949, three years after the death of Alfred Stieglitz, until her own death at 98 in 1986, she lived and worked there.So it is fitting that Santa Fe should be the home of the new Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which opened to the public last month. Dedicated to exhibition, preservation and scholarly study O'Keeffe's work, the museum is housed in a former church near Santa Fe's central plaza.

SANTA FE, N.M.-- Picture a moaning victim tied to a stake, while torch-bearing dancers taunt him with flames and a huge mob calls out, "Burn him, burn him."Sounds like a primitive rite from a far distant land, doesn't it? But it happens in Santa Fe every year in September, when the city fiesta opens with the ritual burning of a 40-foot-tall puppet known as Zozobra.Despite the multicultural setting, with Spanish, Native American and cowboy influences, this bizarre, seemingly pagan tradition has distinctly unglamorous roots: It was launched in the 1920s by a member of the local Kiwanis club.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Home-stake Mining Co. agreed to buy Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corp. for $2.3 billion in stock, topping last week's offer by Newmont Mining Corp. and setting the stage for a possible bidding war.Newmont spokesman Doug Hock said the Denver-based gold producer was deciding whether to respond to Homestake's $17.42-a-share bid for Santa Fe. On Thursday, Newmont made an unsolicited offer of $2 billion, or $15.68 a share, in an attempt to create North America's largest gold-mining company.

It was 48 hours to Revolution Day in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the local kindergartners were practice-parading through their Mexican village like pint-sized "Zapatistas" -- boys sporting Pancho Villa mustaches, girls rouged and ruffled into elegant senoritas. In the spirit of the occasion, they carried balloons, banners and, of course, guns, albeit toy ones.Among the cheering onlookers were many Americans, who I first assumed were on a tour. After all, I'd just gotten off a bus myself.

The Blaustein family has sold its namesake 25-story skyscraper downtown to a Santa Fe investment firm for $9.5 million, ending more than three decades of ownership of a building that helped spark Baltimore's renaissance in the early 1960s.BGK Equities' decision to buy the 1 N. Charles St. office tower marks the second significant commercial real estate investment downtown in as many weeks. Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C.-based Meridian Group Inc. bought the 12-story Candler Building at Market Place for $21.8 million, citing renewed activity downtown.

Baltimore loses another long-time radio voice this week.Elane Stein, a fixture on Baltimore's airwaves for more than three decades, will broadcast the last of her radio spots over WBAL-AM (1090) at 11: 30 a.m. Friday.After that, it's off to Santa Fe, N.M., where she plans to take advantage of the town's burgeoning cultural scene. She also plans to have little -- if anything -- to do with radio there, other than as a listener."I don't like to use that word 'retire,' because I don't ever consider myself retired," she says.

BALTIMORE'S longest-running musical comedy, "The Drunkard," returns to Minnick's Restaurant in Dundalk on April 20 for one performance. Showbiz old-timers may remember this zany show, which opened in 1960 at the Four Corners Cabaret in Jacksonville, where it played to capacity crowds for 14 years, before moving to Minnick's for an eight-year run."The Drunkard" is an adaptation of an old-time melodrama, which involves a lot of audience participation. Guests are encouraged to boo the villain, cheer for the hero and sing along with old-time favorites like "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone."