Staircase

Two iron lamps on chunky fieldstone posts straddle the entrance to a driveway that ambles past a sprawling front lawn and ends at the side garages attached to the equally sprawling, two-story Provencal-style home of the Twigg family. The gray stucco of the exterior, with gables, second-floor dormers and four white columns supporting a large roof over the front porch, would suggest an established estate were it not for new saplings planted along the ends of the property and the construction of houses rising nearby.

I chuckled at the U.S. Census Bureau report that Maryland ranks second only to Utah in the share of its housing with four bedrooms or more. In the Baltimore of my youth, every house on the block had four or more bedrooms. I never gave it a second thought. And far from McMansions, these were Baltimore rowhouses, 22 to each side of the street. It was all very compact, didn't gobble up land, and the streetcar or bus line was just a short walk away.

One Sunday morning 40-some years ago, my mother packed me up, hailed a cab and told the driver to be off to Notre Dame on Charles Street. Our destination was the school she attended, one address, for an incredible 16 years: first-grade, 1923, through her college graduation day, 1939. When I asked about her time there, she said, without hesitation, those were the happiest days of her life. That Sunday, we were probably running a little late. She rushed me through the school's marvelous, if intimidating, Victorian corridors, past the biggest radiators I had ever seen.

A 13-year-old Atlanta boy visiting his father was clinging to life yesterday after being shot in the neck, and investigators are searching for a youth who was seen running from a Southwest Baltimore rowhouse, city police said.The young victim was taken to Bon Secours Hospital and later transferred to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where police said he was in critical and unstable condition. Police did not identify him because they were having difficulty locating relatives.Agent Robert W. Weinhold Jr., a police spokesman, said the boy's father's girlfriend arrived at the house in the first block of S. Franklintown Road about 1:20 p.m. and saw a male juvenile running out the door.

Old Catonsville boasts turn-of-the-last-century buildings and schools, fine restaurants, antiques and music shops, and a library. But scattered among the Victorian structures are Arts and Crafts-style homes built in the early 20th century. It is in one of these that the Shaw family resides, just blocks off of the town's main street. "We moved here from just two blocks away," said Kelley Shaw, a 37-year-old speech pathologist. "Our [other] house had no driveway and we loved the porches on these old houses.

YASMIN GELLER couldn't sleep until she flew her carpenters to their Illinois headquarters and back to Green Spring Valley to rework the posts that she thought marred the contemporary lines of the 23-foot spiral staircase in her new home. The maple-and-glass staircase - a showstopper - had to be just right. After all, she and her husband, Ira, planned to spend the rest of their lives in the 12,000-square-foot, multimillion-dollar abode. The house was their investment. Another baby. A jewel.

High within the Lanhams' 4,500-square-foot dream home sits a loft that can be reached only by squeezing up a spiral stairway. It's that loft that offers them the most comfort."

Peabody Institute held a groundbreaking ceremony yesterday on Mount Vernon Place for a $24 million "grand arcade," which will weave some of its main buildings -- containing the Peabody Library, the Friedberg Concert Hall and Griswold Hall -- together with a skylighted ceiling and other architectural flourishes. Johns Hopkins University President William R. Brody, standing on white marble steps at the campus' main building and addressing the outdoor gathering, said he was grateful to preside over "building something up, not smashing it down," referring to last week's terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

Today's impossible challenge, ladies and gentlemen, pits this standard Catonsville row home, the one with the oh-so-narrow-minded staircase, against this 700-pound, 6-foot-long, Baldwin grand piano.On our left we have the row home's prospective tenant, Adam Mahonske, a cheerful piano teacher at the Baltimore School for the Arts. He wants to move his piano, not into the front room of the row house -- for that would be a little too easy -- but upstairs where he will be able to operate a cheerful little studio.

The cat stretched lazily along the stone staircase. The steep staircases peppered the port of Rio Marina; they led to simple stuccoed buildings with terra cotta roofs and green shutters. They took you along narrow alleyways that dropped off into the glistening blue Mediterranean. I peered down the nearest alleyway. A woman, probably about 80, had planted herself firmly on a bench. Her skin was like tan leather that had been hardened by age. It was as though she had all the time in the world; content to spend it sitting, watching and commenting.