Walkway

Havre de Grace walkway reopening with celebration To commemorate the reconstruction of the Havre de Grace Promenade, which was heavily damaged last September by Tropical Storm Isabel, city officials are celebrating with a First Walk on the walkway along the Susquehana River on the one-year anniversary of the storm. The event is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Sept. 18 with a ribbon cutting near the Concord Point Lighthouse, off Lafayette and Concord streets. Live entertainment will include performances along the promenade by acoustic guitarist/vocalist David Jaffe, the North Bay Bluegrass Pickers and Choo-Choo Charlie the clown.

Diane Benitz took the path of least resistance when she designed her garden five years ago. She simply walked a shady route that she knew sheM-Fd want to take, over and over and over again. And a friendly, neighborhood stone mason helped her translate that walk into big slabs of flagstone, sunken into the earth. Then Benitz planted a lightand- airy array of hostas, azaleas, ferns, toad lilies, SolomonM-Fs seal, a Japanese maple and a tricolored beech tree in the center of her circular path.

As detectives continued to hunt for clues in a mysterious downtown killing that touched off fears among merchants and employees, police identified the victim as a 38-year-old West Baltimore mother of three children. Phyllis A. Bostick of the first block of N. Stockton St. was found beaten to death about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday on an elevated walkway near the Baltimore Convention Center at Pratt and Charles streets, police said. Police had said preliminarily that Bostick did not appear to be a victim of a random attack and was likely killed by someone she knew.

Baltimore homicide detectives are investigating the slaying of a city woman whose body was found yesterday in a walkway leading to the Inner Harbor, a killing that has touched off fears among downtown merchants and employees. Investigators did not release the woman's identity last night. They said the killing does not look to have been a random attack and was most likely committed by someone who knew the victim. The woman, described as a black female in her mid-30s, had planned to meet with someone just before the attack and was probably killed several hours before her body was discovered near the Baltimore Convention Center at 6:30 a.m., police said.

Columbia's nearly 90 miles of meandering pathways -- car-free zones that connect its neighborhoods to schools, pools and village shopping centers -- are viewed as an inalienable right in the planned community. But if residents stroll in the neighborhood north of Hobbit's Glen Golf Club -- where pathways exist only on the golf course -- they risk getting hit in the head with a golf ball. Neighborhood resident Delana Stanfield is leading an effort to persuade the Columbia Association to construct pathways for nongolfers in the design of the course, which is to undergo major reconstruction this month.

The city's approval yesterday of $5 million in bonds for the HarborView waterfront townhouse development project near Federal Hill will allow the company to start building next month a public harbor front walkway and 88 homes, officials said. "This will transform this section of the waterfront into a very classic-looking, urban community," said Frank Wise, a vice president of the HarborView Properties Development Corp. after a unanimous vote by the city's Board of Estimates. The board, which is in charge of overseeing almost all city expenditures, approved the creation of the city's first Tax Increment Financing Bonds, which will borrow money against future real estate taxes that will be generated by construction.

Baltimore plans to build about a half-mile of waterfront walkway in four sections along the Inner Harbor this summer, helping to close some of the gaps in the city's long-unfinished promenade. Construction workers will begin more than $20 million in projects in Fells Point and near Federal Hill that, when finished, should make the 7 1/2 -mile brick walkway about 90 percent complete, city officials said. The promenade, construction of which began more than a quarter-century ago with the Inner Harbor redevelopment, is about 75 percent done from Canton to Locust Point.

Ask an urban planner to define the cradle of civilization, and thoughts drift to that innocuous but vital ribbon of concrete, the sidewalk. "Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow," Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. So it was not surprising that earlier this winter, the city of San Francisco became the first municipality in the country to ban the Segway - the $4,950 self-balancing scooter that resembles a balletic wheeled pogo stick - from the city's sidewalks.

The malaise gripping the airline industry shows no sign of easing, but that won't stop Dallas-based Southwest Airlines from resuming its plans for growth at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the airline's chief executive officer said yesterday. CEO Jim Parker and other Southwest executives descended on Baltimore for a series of employee meetings this week as the airline prepares to open new gates and add more flights to BWI's schedule. Southwest is the dominant carrier at BWI and has been a major force behind the airport's $1.8 billion expansion plans.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - About a decade ago, Bill Sepe uncorked a doozy of an idea. The old Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge - an engineering marvel in 1888 but a delinquent eyesore ever since a spectacular fire closed it in 1974 - should be transformed, he said, into a pedestrian skyway over the Hudson River. The old rail bed, wrapped in its Victorian-era lattice of steel, 200 feet above the water, would get a second life, he said, as strollers and bikers thrilled to the view and the history.