Vacant Lot

Two families were left homeless and two businesses destroyed in a fire last night in Lonaconing directly across the street from the site of a blaze two years ago that left historic buildings in the Allegany County town in ruins.State fire officials said the blaze began in the attic of a two-story wooden duplex about 6 p.m. and was brought under control in about four hours by firefighters from three counties and neighboring West Virginia.An electrical blackout caused by the fire about 9:30 p.m. left about 80 percent of the town without power, officials said.

So far this year, Maryland has been spared hurricanes and big tropical storms, but there's been a monsoon of television and radio advertising on both sides of the casino battle - approaching a cost of $50 million - to woo voters one way or the other. That's a state record, a grotesque orgy of corporate spending. Perhaps you've tuned out by now. I've been getting good at hitting the mute button whenever a Question 7 spot comes on. But on Sunday, one that I hadn't seen before caught my eye. In a commercial break during the telecast of the Ravens-Cowboys game, a man in a brown suit and tasteful tie appeared on the screen, his back to M&T Bank Stadium.

In Baltimore City Opening of rink at Rash Field pushed back to Friday The opening of the Inner Harbor ice rink at Rash Field was postponed for a second time yesterday because of construction problems and is set to open Friday, the Baltimore Office of Promotion said. The grand opening was originally set for the day after Thanksgiving. The rink is beside the Maryland Science Center on Key Highway. Information: 410-385-0675. Woman's body found in vacant lot in Brooklyn The body of a woman known to frequent areas of southern Baltimore was found yesterday in a vacant lot in Brooklyn, and police have ruled her death a homicide.

This is the last season the Orioles will be playing in Waverly, ending a run of 108 years during which an Oriole team has been playing its games in some corner of this neighborhood of baseball ghosts and stories.If ever there is game where history looms, it's baseball. My first brush with the Orioles came at age 3 or 4. My family lived in the 2800 block of Guilford Ave., diagonally across from one of the several Oriole parks during the golden age of baseball. The ballpark at 29th Street and Greenmount Avenue was the home of the International League Orioles, a league the team dominated in the 1920s.

For 20 years, Emma Worrell quietly tended the vacant lot next to her rowhouse in Northeast Baltimore's troubled Pen Lucy neighborhood, making sure unwieldy grass and weeds were trimmed and that trash disappeared. She also hung a sign with the names of youths killed in the surrounding streets, a memorial to victims of the area's once epidemic violence. "We couldn't sit on our front porch for years," said Worrell, a retired city worker and a four-decade resident of Cator Avenue. "You never knew when they were going to break out shooting."

OFFICIALLY, THE gathering in a vacant lot behind Johns Hopkins Hospital yesterday afternoon was the kickoff of a state-run anti-violence project. Unofficially, it was a 'Melo welcome-home block party. The fact that it functioned as both is precisely why the governor's office invited Carmelo Anthony on board. It's also why Anthony accepted so readily and participated so enthusiastically. The project, dubbed "Hype vs. Reality," is the latest attempt to halt the spread of violence by cutting it off at its source - but the swarms of youngsters from all over the area at the site of the announcement weren't lured by the message as much as they were by the 6-foot-8, cornrowed, baby-faced messenger.

By the time Mike Donlan stepped out of the Memory Lane club and onto West Hamburg Street, his ears were ringing from the sounds of a pop-punk band that goes by the assassin-actor name of Lee Harvey Keitel.Donlan's friends are in that band. He'd gone to Memory Lane to hear them. Now it was about 2 a.m. and, with the club closing, Donlan wanted to get back to his Race Street rowhouse, near the old gas tanks in South Baltimore, a few blocks away.But Mike Donlan didn't get there for four days because of what happened in the next 15 minutes.

Ever since Bobby Curran went on a tear about sweetheart real estate deals, the city councilman's critics have whispered the reason: "It's about a bar," they say. Curran is glad to confirm it: His crusade began with Jerry's Belvedere Tavern, a windowless saloon that sits beside a scruffy vacant lot where the city says it spends $15,058 a year on landscaping. "It's my Cheers," Curran says. "It's my haunt for 30 years." At the corner of Northern Parkway and York Road, the bar is long on 25-cent chicken wings and buck-and-a-quarter Buds, but short on parking.

Troubled that the city's demolition drive too often turns scraggly vacant houses into scraggly vacant lots, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that he won't approve demolitions unless plans are in place for the lots left behind when the bulldozers roll away.The mayor didn't go so far as to order a moratorium on demolitions, but his comments suggested that the fast pace of the city's effort to raze 1,000 houses this year will be slowed."In too many instances, we have replaced the eyesore of a vacant house with the eyesore of a vacant lot," Schmoke said.

LeRoy McDuffie is heading for greener turf. No longer will he have to lug his golf clubs aboard two city buses -- "you just take the 13, then the 19" -- to play 18 holes at the nearest municipal course. No longer will he practice -- as he did as captain of the ragtag, scoffed-at and, until this year, winless St. Frances Academy golf team -- in a dusty vacant lot next to the small Roman Catholic school that sits in the shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary. And no longer will he worry about stray shots careening off drug dealers, police cars or bail bond storefronts on Greenmount Avenue, in the stagnant and stifling inner-city neighborhood where grass itself is rare, much less budding young golfers.