<p>As Michael Phelps embarks on his final Olympic lap, we chronicle his training leading up to London, his life in Baltimore, and his future outside of the pool.</p>
One-hundred-and-five days before the beginning of the end, Michael Phelps appears as relaxed as a man whose every move is being recorded by cameras and curious eyes can be.
Wearing a three-piece black suit with a purple tie that fits the venue, the tallest, richest, and most famous guy in the club level of M&T Bank Stadium fetches his mother, Debbie, a glass of white wine from the bar, and...
<p>Baltimore City College’s first class with women celebrates a 30th reunion.</p>
Anita Allen was about five years old when her big brother, Alton, a student at Baltimore City College, came home in his marching-band uniform.
“I remember him wearing that big top hat and playing the saxophone, and I thought that was just so cool,” she says. A few years later, when Alton became the first of Allen’s 15 siblings to graduate from college, she thought, “I need to go to that high...
For 35 years, House of Ruth has been giving voice and hope to victims of domestic violence.
Sitting in an office at House of Ruth Maryland, Christina Laumann takes a deep breath as she begins her story. It’s the one that started in 1993 when she was 14 and first fell in love with a 16-year-old boy she knew from the neighborhood, and ended in 2008 with an emergency divorce after a middle-of-the-night assault that still haunts her.
“It seemed like he wanted to give me the world, and I...
<p>Crabaret offers eating and altruism for the 10th year.</p>
Held in The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Sculpture Garden, Crabaret gives the grubby Eastern Shore crab-feast tradition a total makeover: trading out brown paper towel rolls for linens and cheap beer for locally crafted microbrew.
Celebrated chef John Shields, pictured on far right, returns as the in-house chef, and, if menus from past affairs are any indicator (crab-and-curry stir-fry, crab...
<p>A Hopkins dean commits to East Baltimore’s renewal.</p>
When David Andrews became dean of The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education in late 2010, he and his wife, Marti, packed up their stuff and moved from a 15-acre horse farm in Ohio to Baltimore. Initially, they settled in a rented Guilford manse while they looked for a full-time place. They considered buying in Guilford or other neighborhoods that could replicate the peace and quaintness...
A local designer creates an on-the-go desk.
A few years ago, Mike Rice was trying to use his laptop to sketch some drawings outside of his family’s summer home in Canada. But he needed a workspace. So he went to his woodshop and carved out a desk. “My family kept asking me to build more for them,” Rice says. “So after a brainstorming session, we decided to sell it.” And, the Belly Bean was born. The wooden desk is shaped like a bean, able...
<p>Patrick Russell turns up the heat at home.</p>
Patrick Russell grew up enjoying the fried pork chops, meatballs, and meatloaf of his mother’s Pikesville kitchen, but it wasn’t until purchasing Thames Street Tavern (now Kooper’s Tavern) in 1997 that he really learned the joys of cooking.
“I hired my friend [former Cork’s chef] Jerry Pellegrino to help me cook,” recalls Russell, who got his restaurant start as a busboy at The Mt. Washington...
<p>A group of Catholics finds a local bar blasphemous.</p>
A priest walks into a bar. . . . No, it’s not the start of a joke, but closely mirrors a dispute between some Catholics and a Fells Point watering hole.
Recently, a group of religious devotees claimed that bar and restaurant Ale Mary’s was blasphemous because of its name and church-themed décor. The bar owners, in turn, said there was nothing irreverent about it, and that most of the objects were...
<p>Park School graduate Sam O’Keefe is a bike-race champ.</p>
Everyone bike rides as a kid, but Sam O’Keefe turned it into a competitive passion. “When I was 11, my mom signed me up for a camp at Joe’s Bike Shop,” he says. “Eventually, the shop guys encouraged me to race.” They introduced O’Keefe to Cyclo-cross, a multi-terrain bike race with obstacles. “It’s the cycling equivalent of steeplechase,” he explains. O’Keefe won his first race at Charm City...
<p>Police K-9 units have become an increasingly essential law-enforcement tool in and around Baltimore.</p>
On a clear, crisp March day, Officer Christopher Davies prepares the second floor of a long-abandoned building at Rosewood State Hospital to go to the dogs—or, more specifically, to the Baltimore County K-9 unit.
Earlier in the day, Davies had signed out dangerous controlled substances stored in a safe at Essex headquarters (many of which were seized during local drug busts) as well as an arsenal...
