York Road

With a deadline looming, Towson's business district makeover got a green light yesterday, allowing the highly touted economic development project to proceed on schedule along with a planned traffic roundabout.Baltimore County officials announced they had obtained the required number of approvals from property owners to add brick sidewalks, greenery and ornamental lighting to the York Road district -- improvements seen as a way to boost business and improve the town's image."It is absolutely key to the revitalization of the downtown area," said Towson Republican Councilman Douglas B. Riley.

Towson University plans to spend $783,000 for a half-acre at Burke Avenue and York Road that will be used to plant a sign greeting visitors to Towson, as an entrance to the university campus and as a parking lot.The former site of a Crown service station at the northwest corner of the intersection is slated to be purchased from the estate of Saul Goldman, a New York businessman, said Baltimore County officials.The parcel will be owned by Towson University, but Baltimore County plans to give Towson $200,000 to help pay for it.Crown Central Petroleum is to give the university another $153,000 to help defray the costs, county officials said.

One of the largest undeveloped pieces of commercial property on York Road was sold at auction yesterday to Target Stores, adding another major retailer to a busy corridor where residents already are concerned about congestion.Target's parent company, Dayton Hudson Corp., bid $8.8 million for the 11-acre Texas site now used by Baltimore County for its public works crews, surprising county officials who had predicted the property would bring much less."It exceeded my expectations," said Robert J. Barrett, special assistant to County Executive C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger.

Cataclysmic comparisons came quick and easy yesterday for business owners recovering from a torrent of water and mud that descended on a Lutherville shopping center. "At its worst, it was like Niagara Falls," said Sheila Landers, manager of the Maytag Store in Yorkridge Shopping Center, part of which was slimed Saturday by a wall of cascading mud churned up by a broken water main on York Road. Landers - who described the water as "nasty muddy" - and other business people on the shopping center's eastern perimeter were forced to plug their rear doorways with trash bags and whatever else came to hand in an effort to stop the treacly mess from seeping in. Some succeeded, some did not. Yesterday, the task turned toward cleaning up, both inside some of the stores and in a parking lot behind them, where a Baltimore County Bureau of Utilities crew used bulldozers, excavators and a huge vacuum-cleaner truck to get rid of the mud, much of it now dried, caked and almost impenetrable in the heat.

"To Appearance, Trans-Susquehanna is peaceful enough, -- Farm-houses, a School-house, a Road to York." -- Thomas Pynchon, "Mason & Dixon"The town that borders York Road's last mile in Maryland has added an inn, a cement plant and other development since the fabled surveyors passed through more than 230 years ago, but it retains a serene appearance.One- and two-story clapboard houses that date to the 1800s line the road as it climbs a slight ridge before reaching Pennsylvania. Behind the houses of Maryland Line, cornfields cut across nearby hills.

The "mayor" of Towson is leaving town.After almost a half-century, Dick Rudolph -- who was given the unofficial title by friend William Donald Schaefer years ago -- is moving his shoe store, Towson Bootery, to a nearby mall.The relocation marks a poignant passage for Rudolph, 79, who started the York Road shop on a shoestring budget in 1948. "It's going to break my heart," he said. "It's like losing a home."But times have changed on Main Street, U.S.A. Old-fashioned retail is giving way to restaurants and specialty shops.

State highway officials are planning to spend more than $13 million to improve York Road in the Lutherville and Timonium areas. Plans call for the road to be widened along a stretch just north of the Beltway in Lutherville. Another project would improve the intersection of York and Padonia roads. The $650,000 worth of improvements for the intersection will include widening the northbound lanes of York Road to create a second left-turn lane. The transportation department also plans to upgrade the traffic signals and install a new traffic barrier.

A 60-year-old woman has died after a head-on car accident on York Road in Parkton Friday morning, according police in Baltimore County. Linda Bennett was driving a 1993 Buick Park Avenue south when police said she drifted over the center line and hit a 2002 Ford F-450 driven by 43-year-old Christopher Ayers. The accident occurred about 7:10 a.m. just south of Kauffman Road. Bennett was flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center and died shortly after she arrived, police said. Ayres was not injured.

A tanker truck carrying up to 9,000 gallons of propane overturned, hit a utility pole and knocked down some live power lines early this morning, forcing the temporary closure of a section of Old York Road near Parkton in Baltimore County, authorities said. About 20 people from five homes within a half-mile radius of the accident scene were evacuated as a precaution, county fire officials said. There were no reports of injuries. Capt. Jim Korn of the Baltimore County Fire Department said the 18-wheel tanker sustained "no significant structural damage" in the accident, which occurred around 3 a.m., east of Interstate 83 and just south of the Pennsylvania state line.

The State Highway Administration has started repair work along the York Road corridor, from Northern Parkway in the city to Stevenson Lane in Towson, as part of a $6.2 million project. Lanes will be closed temporarily over the next two weeks as crews begin repairing the pavement to prepare for a major reconstruction and landscaping project that will begin in late January, SHA officials said. Called the York Road Neighborhood Conservation Program, it is expected to be completed by the summer of 2005.