Vanished

For generations, this downtown neighborhood close to Camden Yards has seemed almost Dickensian: a working-class district where humor, pathos, pride and concern for the people next door take the edge off hard times.With its narrow streets, weathered buildings and scraggly skyline, Pigtown evokes a 19th-century Baltimore where people walked to work for the railroad, set clocks by the whistles and swept soot off the sidewalks.Oddball things often happened. In the early part of this century, the spectacle of pigs being driven through the streets, from stockyards to slaughterhouse, was commonplace.

Baltimore police retrieved a decomposed body from the Inner Harbor yesterday afternoon that may be that of Donald A. Baker -- the marketing executive who disappeared from a party at his upscale condominium building last month, police said.A watch and wedding ring recovered from the body appeared to match the description of jewelry Mr. Baker was wearing on the night he vanished, police said. But a positive identification cannot be made until an autopsy is completed.Lt. Timothy Keel of the Baltimore police homicide unit said the body was spotted in the water shortly after 1:30 p.m. near the HarborView Towers condominiums, where Mr. Baker last was seen alive at an informal gathering of residents in the building's recreation room March 12.That night, his wife reported to police that her husband left the party about 9 p.m. to go for a stroll around the harbor and never came back.

Columbia is no paradise for trumpling swans.The disappearance of a trumpling swan from Columbia's Lake Kittamaqundi in September and the spray-painting of a swan earlier this month have forced researchers to move the lake's four resident swans to Virginia.The swans were rounded up yesterday morning by Columbia Association workers to be transported to Airlie Center in central Virginia, a preserve and home to the Swan Research Program."I couldn't be happier to see them go. I was getting very worried about their safety," said Helen Thompson, a member of the Columbia Waterfowl Committee, a wildlife protection group.

The New Year's Eve party is winding down, you've had too much to drink, your designated driver has vanished -- and you don't have cash for a cab.If you are in Howard County, you can still get a ride home -- for free -- from Columbia Cab.For the third straight December, Columbia Cab, in cooperation with the county government and the Howard County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), is offering free cab rides for those who have overindulged in alcohol but cannot afford to pay for a cab.The program, which applies only in Howard County, runs through Monday.

German flavor IN ITS early days, Baltimore used to have a strong German flavor. Four out of seven original Town Council members were German; the first official city clock was in the steeple of their church. Zion Lutheran Church on City Hall Plaza still has a 9:15 a.m. worship service in German every Sunday. But most other German institutions - from bier gardens to newspapers - vanished a long time ago. Once-plentiful German restaurants also have virtually disappeared. Deutsches Haus, the home of choirs and other ethnic organizations, is long gone.

ONCE, YOU HARDLY needed a television guide to know which shows could be found where. The stations were fixed on the dial ever since you watched your the first "Romper Room." One network always carried football, another brought you Jim McKay's Olympics as assuredly as spring follows winter. Families huddled around the "tube" and took comfort in finding Chet and David or Uncle Walter at the same time in the same place on the TV dial, night after night.That era has vanished -- from television and from life itself.

WASHINGTON - Nearly a week after her skeleton was discovered in the dirt and underbrush of Rock Creek Park, authorities confirmed yesterday what has long been suspected: Chandra Levy was the victim of a homicide. But officials said they could not determine exactly how she was killed. Dr. Jonathan L. Arden, Washington's chief medical examiner, said he concluded that the 24-year-old former government intern had been killed based on how and where her remains were found, as well as from evidence at the scene.

BANGALORE, INDIA -- On our visits home to Bangalore when I was a child, my mom toted giant jars of Skippy so my siblings and I could have peanut butter sandwiches. My grandmother bought her vegetables fresh from a cart that a skinny, muscular man pushed through the street, and milk was sold, still warm, by a man who milked the water buffalo in front of her house. When we went touring outside the city, it was only to visit ancient temple after ancient temple. These were some of the sureties of my India.

Dr. Rat, the khaki-clad, crusading superhero who delighted schoolchildren and became one of Baltimore's more mysterious cult figures, is expected to appear in public tonight for the first time in 17 years during an anti-rodent rally in front of City Hall.Between 1980 and 1982, the enigmatic Dr. Rat, whose academic credentials have long been shrouded in secrecy, visited every elementary school in the city.Accompanied by actors and musicians, he sang self-composed tunes such as "Pestilence" and enlisted youngsters for the city's crusade to keep the local rat population under control.

On the day he decided to drop off the face of the Earth, Hamilton Schmidt was tormented -- by both the embarrassment the impending collapse of his company would bring and the feeling that he had been betrayed.His nightmare had intensified with each day for months, though there was no public display of the pressure he was under.But two letters he sent on the very day he vanished -- Tuesday, Sept. 14 -- reveal a man who no longer could maintain his walk on the tightwire."I feel my mental and physical health is in jeopardy," Mr. Schmidt wrote in a one-page letter to his company, the Charter Group Inc. "I have lost my desire and drive to lead.