Super Pride

Three months after closing three of its eight supermarkets, Baltimore-based Super Pride Markets will close its remaining stores, the company's management consultant said yesterday. Once one of the city's largest independent supermarket chains, Super Pride shut down its Cherry Hill Road location Thursday. The chain plans to close its other four stores, said Robert Riesner, president of KMR Management Inc. of Willow Grove, Pa., which specializes in helping troubled companies. Employees and managers also said the stores at Harford Avenue; Lafayette Avenue and Payson Street; West Belvedere Avenue; and Liberty Road will close, but it was unclear when that would happen.

Super Pride Markets, one of Baltimore's largest independent supermarket chains, has closed two of its eight stores and will soon close a third. Supermarkets on East Chase Street and Liberty Heights Avenue have closed, a company source said yesterday. Employees at the East Northern Parkway location said that store is preparing to close. Two years ago, the 30-year-old chain had remodeled a store in Cherry Hill and hoped to expand into underserved, urban areas outside Baltimore, the chain's president, Oscar Smith Jr., had said.

Once practically guaranteed the loyalty of neighborhood shoppers, independent grocers throughout Maryland are fighting for survival, squeezed by big chains with deep pockets as consumers spend more time and money eating out and turn increasingly to mass discounters.Independent chains say they can no longer be all things to all shoppers, especially as competition has reached a fever pitch with retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kmart and Rite Aid stocking groceries. Dominant chains such as Giant Food Inc. and Safeway Inc. have extended their reach, while others, such as Metro Food Markets and Food Lion, are vowing to take even bigger bites of the market.

Since its last movie screening in 1968, the historic Ambassador Theater in Howard Park has been a cosmetology school, a dance hall and a Baptist church - and in recent years a vacant shell. The Baltimore neighborhood's hopes for revitalization of the Art Deco structure are again up for discussion, after a two-alarm fire tore through the interior last week. An owner described the damage as "minimal" - up to $20,000 - and he and others nearby see an opportunity for the theater.

The Baltimore County police have arrested a man and charged him with the holdup Friday of a Super Pride in Woodmoor.They are now trying to determine whether there is a link between the supermarket robbery and four other recent holdups, including that of a Timonium restaurant Thursday.In all the holdups, the police said, the robbers were armed with shotguns, and because of the similarities in the descriptions of the suspects and the manner in which the businesses were robbed, investigators are exploring the possibility that the same men are responsible.

To those spearheading an effort to revitalize Cherry Hill, the grand opening yesterday of a supermarket in the economically depressed southern Baltimore neighborhood provides residents with a convenient place to shop -- and a reason to be proud."

The city Board of Estimates is expected to approve a $50,000 grant today to support the reopening of the former Super Pride supermarket in Cherry Hill as a 16,000-square-foot, full-service grocery store to be known as Integrity Foods. The grant is one piece of $750,000 in funding from a combination of city, state and private sources that will help restore a local supermarket in the community. Cherry Hill lost its only grocery in 2000 when Super Pride, anchor of a refurbished town center owned by Catholic Charities, went out of business.

Twice within the last month, the manager of the Super Pride Market in Randallstown has had a shotgun pointed at her face by two men who made her turn over cash from the store safe."

Elva L. Gilmore is known as the warden of Cherry Hill for her penchant for bluntness. "I tell it how it is, and on a 1-to-10 scale, this is a 20," Gilmore said at the grand opening of Hilltop Market yesterday as she sat in her wheelchair in front of Cherry Hill's first supermarket since Super Pride went out of business in October 2000. About 200 residents celebrated the opening as if Independence Day came early, with a steel band, cake and speeches from Mayor Martin O'Malley and Cardinal William H. Keeler.

Christopher Wills, the man freed by a Baltimore judge because his trial on carjacking and armed robbery charges languished too long, denounced his rearrest on federal charges stemming from the same crime yesterday, calling it a "vengeful prosecution."In a telephone interview from the city jail, Wills said he was cleared of the state charges three months ago because prosecutors and judges violated his right to a "speedy trial" within Maryland's 180-day deadline."When I [win] because you violated my rights, don't try to persecute me unfairly," Wills said.