Water S Edge

Measuring the value of her three-story Cambridge home has never been difficult for Katie Coleman -- she can do it in 100 steps."That's how far we are from the water," she said. "I know that walk by heart."The Colemans' wood-frame home is near the bank of the Choptank River as it meanders through the Eastern Shore city. From the comfort of their screened-in front porch, Mrs. Coleman and her husband Keith can just see the water's edge.And that's why the couple said they can't imagine living anywhere else.

In the first major component of a planned high-technology business corridor along U.S. 40 in Harford County, the Bata Shoe Co. plant will be razed this year to make way for a $63 million office park, county officials announced yesterday.The proposed Water's Edge Corporate Campus on the banks of the Bush River -- which officials hope will draw 1,300 jobs to the county -- will join a community of 400 homes, two waterfront restaurants and a hotel and conference center being built in the area.

O'Conor, Piper, Flynn selected to market Water's Edge in Del.O'Conor, Piper & Flynn ERA said it has been selected by developer Joel Brodsky of Fenwick Island Properties to market Water's Edge, a new development on the bay between Fenwick Island and Bethany Beach, Del.Water's Edge will consist of 17 upscale four-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot townhouses with views of both the bay and ocean.The development, started in October, has sold out 75 percent of its first phase.News in briefMarrick Homes of Calvert County said it has chosen Builder's 1st Choice as exclusive sales representative for all its communities.

WHAT is it? The African Penquin is a bird. It doesn't fly, though it kind of looks like it's flying when it swims. Adults are 18 inches tall and weigh 8 pounds. It's mostly black and white, with a little red skin around its beak and eyes. Its feet are black and pink.WHERE does it live? It lives on several remote, windswept islands off the coast of southern Africa.IS it endangered? Officially, no. There are 15,000 left in the wild. But scientists think they easily could become extinct.WHY?

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Watching from afar, it is a thrill to see the president of the United States doing so well in China. Most of us have had our ups and downs with William Jefferson Clinton, but he is "us" -- past the water's edge, one man is America.On a fundamental level, the real job of a president is to bring out the best in the American people -- and, therefore, to show the best of us to the rest of the world. President Clinton did that last week, and it has been fun to watch. For the first time, really, he has been able to display his astonishing political skills in a far place.

Looking for a bud to swim with? How 'bout your dog? But first, find out if he's a water lover. The book "Totally Fun Things to Do With Your Dog" says here's how you can tell:* Fill a large plastic tub with warm water and toss in your pup's fave toy. If Rover goes in after it, he's a water hound. If he just paws at the water, he's thinking about it. If he stalks away, no way are you gonna turn him into a water pup.* If your dog digs the wet stuff, hurray! You can play water games! Here's a "Totally Fun" way to introduce him to water:* Let him sniff the water, wade in it and walk near the water's edge.

The Porter family wanted to build a swimming pool at its Seneca Creek Marina in eastern Baltimore County, but had been stymied for 18 months by strict regulations protecting the Chesapeake Bay from shoreline development.But a change approved this week by the state's Chesapeake Bay Critical Areas Commission for the county's 173 miles of shoreline has given a boost to the plans of the Porters and more than 100 other waterfront property owners who have applied to build near the water."Our marina is family oriented," Joy Porter said yesterday, explaining that the pool was needed to keep customers who like to spend weekends on their boats, but often don't leave the 106-slip facility.

WASHINGTON -- For months, as President Clinton's re-election campaign moved uneventfully forward and Bob Dole struggled for a foothold, the broad assumption was that absent some unforeseen major development, the president would be home free on November 5. Now such an event has occurred -- Saddam Hussein's incursion into Kurdish territory, triggering the president's decision to launch retaliatory air strikes against Iraq.As an American chief executive whose lack of foreign-policy experience has always made him vulnerable to criticism, Mr. Clinton is under particular pressure to demonstrate strength, fortitude and wisdom in handling the latest crisis.

PRESIDENT CLINTON should accept that whatever he does or fails to do with respect to Iraq's aggression, leading Republican campaigners will criticize him for doing too much or too little or both. So he might as well try to do the right thing. The trick is to figure out what that is.It is too late to urge that politics stop at the water's edge, a principle handed down from another era. Lip service will not make it work this time anymore than it did when Democrats questioned President Bush's gulf war deployment.

It's been said that somewhere in Baltimore there is always a breeze.And it's true, even in the sweltering summer. I've got my own list of places to find a cooling breeze, which I'll share:* The sea wall at Fort McHenry. Don't go into the fort itself. It's got high brick walls and is pretty arid.If the air is moving, it will be at the water's edge alongside the old stone wall. There the two branches (Middle and Northwest) of the Patapsco River divide. It's also great zephyr territory. Earlier this month I was there on a sultry Saturday afternoon.

An affiliate of the National Aquarium plans to start an environmental cleanup of nearly 13 acres along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River this fall and open a public park late next year, but has put on hold more elaborate plans to build an animal care facility. The aquarium's Center for Aquatic Life and Conservation Inc. said today it is seeking a contractor to clean up its contaminated waterfront property in South Baltimore, along Baltimore's lesser-known harbor. The two-phase project will create a park with walking trails, some of which will connect to the Gwynns Falls trail, a 100-foot fishing pier and some wooded areas, said Tim Pula, the aquarium's senior director of capital planning.

The push for intense development along the water's edge can be traced largely to the administrations of Kurt L. Schmoke and Martin O'Malley, who recognized the water's ability to draw businesses of all kinds. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the city had strong restrictions on waterfront development. Its master plan called for low- and mid-rise buildings close to the water and taller buildings several blocks inland, a strategy that limited the amount of new construction along the water's edge.

New shops and restaurants would rise along more than a dozen blocks of Baltimore's most heavily traveled downtown boulevard, Pratt Street, and the corridor itself would get a $100 million makeover in one of the city's most ambitious urban renewal initiatives since the redevelopment of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor. Mayor Sheila Dixon is scheduled today to unveil final plans to revitalize a 16-block stretch of Pratt Street during the annual meeting of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, a civic organization that has led the drive to transform the corridor into a more inviting and pedestrian-friendly gateway to Baltimore's waterfront and business districts.

Dear Machine Man, I'm the woman who lives across the wide creek in Annapolis. You already know who you are. You are the man of all things loud - the Almighty Macho Machine Man. You have never met a two-cycle engine you didn't like. "The more noise, the better" is your motto. You begin your onslaught with a little leaf-blowing at the mind-boggling hour of 7:30 a.m. Not your regular, steady ear-splitting whine, mind you. No. Instead of a constant "WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAA- AAAAAAAA," you choose the much more annoying form of a pulsing on and off: "WWWAAA" ... blessed second of silence ... "WWWAAA" ... and on and on, ad infinitum.

With cameras rolling and reporters scribbling, Gov. Martin O'Malley got down and dirty with a bunch of his constituents Friday morning. He turned over rocks to see what slithered from the gooey underside and cast a wide net to help them find spineless creatures that hid in the shadows. No, Maryland's chief executive wasn't leading a State House tour. He was standing along the bank of a Patapsco River tributary, emphasizing the importance of enjoying the outdoors and being good stewards of the environment.

I snapped this shot of my 16-year-old daughter, Catherine, while on vacation in Greece in June. The photo was taken around the pool at the Astra Hotel on the Greek island of Santorini. Although the potential drop from the side of the pool looks imposing (given the steepness of the cliffs), the roof of the next building is only about 10 feet below the edge. Tom Kane Timonium

Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, spent decades dispelling the notion that cities should be designed around cars; instead, she promoted the city as a people place. Baltimore still needs to catch on. A few years ago, the quasi-public Baltimore Development Corp. (BDC) was given the task of fixing what had been identified as downtown Baltimore's biggest woe: the "parking gap." It attacked this problem with single-minded zeal. Since then, in the downtown area, parking spaces have been sprouting far more frequently than coffee shops - tens of thousands of them.

EVANSVILLE, IND. -- It was only a 6-foot deep retention pond, but for the hundreds of people who lived at the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, it was a lake, a pleasant diversion from the straight streets, right angles and modular sameness of their trailer community. Yesterday, the small lake on the eastern edge of Evansville provided some of the final stories of survival and death as recovery teams drained the water and raked through the mud and debris in search of victims of a deadly early morning tornado that destroyed the mobile home park.

A Memorable Place Weathering the soggy skies of Ireland By Evan L. Balkan SPECIAL TO THE SUN The old saw about Ireland is that it rains incessantly. Unfortunately, on my one trip there, it proved to be accurate. Ireland was country No. 4 on a five-month trip through Europe. Eventually, I would get as far east as the Julian Alps in Slovenia and as far south as the confluence of the Mediterranean and Atlantic on Spain's southern coast. I had crossed into Ireland from Wales. During the next two weeks, I headed north (Dublin and Drogheda)

Let's say you're a developer gentrifying several properties in Fells Point, and you don't want a "problem bar" to open right in the middle of them. You can always do what Larry Silverstein did. When the building that had once housed the Red Star restaurant (and for a short time, the Water's Edge) came up for sale, his company, Union Box Co., bought it up. Besides, Silverstein says, "I live in Fells Point and I work late. I had a problem finding a place to go for a light meal after work."