Rainbows Over Pigtown – Luck for the Ravens 2008?

Maybe these rainbows will give the Ravens some luck this year:

Save-A-Lot Update

 So, I was driving home on Friday morning when something caught my eye. A bright orange thing around the Save-A-Lot. A really shiny bright orange thing:

Well, at least Raj LLC did something about their loiterers… after a whole year!

Sadly, the vagrants have moved over to a shady knoll with their mattress and one of them was following the call of nature on the drain/sewage opening there.  There goes my dream of guerrilla gardening that area… although, I daresay some stinging nettle might work really well.

Zella’s Pizzeria

Location: 1145 Hollins Street; Baltimore, MD 21223
Phone: (410) 685-6999
Hours: Kitchen Hours:  Closed Tuesdays  M,W,Th,F,Sat:  1130-11pm Sun:  12:30-10pm
Bar Hours: Thur., Fri., & Sat. 11:30 – 12:00

Kind of place: Local pizza joint that you go to/get delivery from every week.

Zella’s was voted for Best Pizza in 2007 by the Citypaper for good reason:  the pizzas are created on a strong foundation of soft tender dough, zesty sauce, and creamy, gooey cheese.   And like the venerable institution of Matthew’s Pizza, Zella’s doesn’t skimp on their servings but somehow leaves you hankering for more.  (If you ever order their meatball calzone, you’ll know what I’m talking about– it’s the size of a football and it takes you two or three meals to finish it, yet somehow when take your last bite, you wish you had another one in the fridge.)

Unlike Matthew’s though, Zella’s has an amazing amount of space for dining inside and the parking in Hollins Market is of course plentiful.  The dishes at Zella’s are slightly jazzed up (try their caprese or their Pizza Proscuitto) and the environment is artful and yet cozy.  In fact it’s the ambience that wooed me over, a kind of quietly classic pizzeria without the gimmicks of other pizza places.  It’s the kind of place that you take your parents to, to show them that the west side isn’t so bad (and make them a little jealous that they don’t have a place like it!)

The bar is where Zella’s beats most pizza houses in the city away.  With a decent selection of affordable wines and a higher standard for beers on tap, Zella’s is a wonderful place to get together with a large group of friends to drink, eat great pizza, and catch up.  But don’t get deterred by the bar if you have wee ones:  I don’t think I’ve ever been to Zella’s when there wasn’t a lovely couple with children. 

Zella’s deliver too and if you’re too tired to make dinner, I highly recommend that you call them to deliver.  (Unfortunately, they have a limited delivery area, but you live in Hollins Market or Pigtown, I think you’ll be ok.)  It’s the best place to get pizza and it’s not expensive for the quality and the quantity. 

Piggy Doorstop

I swear I’m not getting any money from these porcine products I keep posting, but damnit, they’re cute.  And of course, I absolutely NEED a piggy doorstop as I live in Pigtown:

 

Math and 701 Washington Blvd

Let’s assume that the lease for this thing was $5.00/sq ft when the Save-A-Lot was still here.  At 17035 square feet, that means that the store was paying $85,175 per year on the lease.  This means that the store had to make more than $7098 per month to just cover the lease.  This doesn’t include other expenses such as employee wages or utilities.  If you have a store with 10 people on the payroll, at $6.55/hour, you need to have made $10,480 per month to cover your employees.  Your utilities are pretty hefty too with the cost of electricity to cool your goods at 17,035 sq feet:  so let’s assume something like $5000/month.   And stores must run on some kind of profit margin, so let’s assume that the store was making 25% on its sales.   From these barebones calculations, the Save-A-Lot store had to make a minimal $28,223 to stay afloat.  What does this mean?

What it means is that when you double the lease of a store to $170,350 per year, you are assuming that the store is making $37,095 per month, which I doubt the store was making.  The Save-A-Lot is a store that targets a demographic of people with a fixed income of $35,000/year. And even if it was making gangbusters, it’s still difficult to justify a two-fold leap in lease.

In a neighborhood that had an average income of $28,000 per year, I doubt the landlord is going to find anyone willing to pay that much for this property.  Or any bank to approve a loan for a business on this property. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Raj LLC is willing to have this loss.  If the company can somehow afford to purchase a property for 2.8 million and leave it empty for a year, they are somehow willing to swallow the interest on the loan on the property.  They can afford a loss of $170,350 in revenue this year, meaning they can afford the guesstimated payment of $159,000 per year in loan interest. Meaning that Raj LLC must be making some ridiculous amount of money and needs a tax shelter.

Oh Raj LLC. I think you should adopt me and pay me six figures to sit around vacant for a year. With that kind of money, I can clean up real good. I promise! And since you like to buy stuff and neglect them completely, I’m certain that you won’t mind if I take that money to the Greek Islands. Or St. Thomas. Or the Bahamas!

 

Vote for Pigtown

I’ve already posted this once, but in case you didn’t take it seriously, VOTE for PIGTOWN. 

Monday Nights @ Lucy’s

Lucy’s is an Irish Pub in the Westside of town, across the street from the Hippodrome.  A 15 minute walk from Pigtown, it’s one of the best places to hang out on a Monday Night for one reason:  World Tavern Poker.

Dozens of people flock to this bar on a Monday night to play poker for free.  There’s no cost in getting into the game, which can provide minutes to hours of fun on Monday nights.  There are regulars.  There are rookies.  And then there are the Pigtowners.

Actually, there are only two of us.  But we’re not just there for the game, but for the food too.  The bar fare is exceptionally good for their cost and with endless happy hour specials on Monday nights, you can go out and play all night on Monday night for $20/person.   The bar food is executed extremely well, as are the standard Irish pub entrées, and the service is so wonderful and charming that I can’t help but enjoy myself there even when I’m in the loser’s lounge.

So if you need some cheap eats and would like to stumble home with us afterwards, come to Lucy’s on Monday nights.  It’ll be a lot of fun.

Some details:

The poker tournaments start once at 7pm and again at 10pm.  The happy hour prices start at 3pm and end when the bar closes.  It’s Texas Hold ‘Em, so if you know how to play, it’ll be pretty easy.

701 Washington Blvd.

As some of you know, the Save-A-Lot on Washington Blvd (701 Washington Blvd) has been vacant for over a year now.  It’s not a pretty site:  there is a lot of trash and a lot of misplaced people there.  The Save-A-Lot wasn’t the best place to buy goods, but it was a place to buy goods.  Plus, the manager of the store did his best to keep it a safe place for people to go.  Because of his hard work and his employees,  it was rumored as the third highest grossing Save-A-Lot store in the country.  Then one day, it was shut down.

The week that the Save-A-Lot shut down, I was able to talk to one of the employees there and they informed me that the landlord was asking for 2X more in the lease.  I had no idea how much that was until I looked it up.  It’s not a lot by real estate standards, but it is steep and ridiculous for property that has not improved AT ALL since it was sold to Raj LLC for 2.8 million dollars in 2005.

A lot of rumors have been floating around the place about this site.  It was rumored to be a multi-use property and then there were rumors that it was going to be a Trader Joe’s, but none of the rumors can erase the reality that this is the gateway to our neighborhood and it’s a dump.  Tony’s Grill and Jackie’s still hold on, but what will happen when these two businesses leave because of rent hikes?  And how depressing is it that the owner can spend 2.8 million for the property but can’t seem to get a tenant?

Perhaps Raj LLC is a retail slumlord with a personal vendetta against Pigtown, but that seems unlikely.  (They still might be slumlords.)  It is more likely that potential tenants see the property and realize that the management of the property is sorely lacking and they’re not motivated to move here.  And when they do the numbers they see that the demographics are wrong for the rent. 

Or perhaps the site is cursed.

Who knows?  So many rumors have been floating about this site.  But now there’s a problem. 

Apparently, there are people coming to the Save-a-Lot and encouraging the vagrants to loiter on the property by distributing food and clothes.  Typically, this wouldn’t be a huge issue, except that it goes against all that the community has worked towards– to make the area viable for businesses.   And though I have great sympathy for the needy, it’s not public property and it’s not fair to the businesses in the area.

As a community, we have called the listing agent many times to address the issues with the site and seen very little progress.  However, with more people vocalizing concerns on the site, it might bring about real change.

If you do see anything happening that shouldn’t be happening on 701 Washington Blvd, please contact Gordon Darmsteadt, and he’s the listing agent for the property.  The phone number is (410) 203-2046.  You can also try to write to the landlord:

Raj LLC
1900 ROLLING RD
BALTIMORE MD 21244

I say try, because the address doesn’t seem legitimate. (Google mapped the address, looked for Raj, and got an auto repair shop). So the listing agent is probably the way to go for now.

I’m going to keep this post updated until real change is brought to the property. Any information you want to add would be greatly appreciated.

Vote for Pigtown

There’s the buzz of competition in the air! SC Johnson will clean up one of three Baltimore neighborhoods and one of the neighborhoods selected is Pigtown! We’re competing against Highlandtown and Penn Ave and we really need your vote!

Just follow this link and then select Pigtown. It doesn’t need any personal information, it takes your IP address and your browser info and counts it. If you have more than one browser loaded on your computer, you can vote one each browser once. If you have different computers (ie, one at work and one at home) it will count each one of those once. So please just click and submit your vote for Pigtown.

The Perfect Reusable Bag

Reusable cotton grocery bags are terribly unfashionable:  bulky, heavy, and not really washable (1) they litter my house pitifully.  I thought I would just end up recycling all of my plastic bags for the rest of my life (2), but then we went to India.

India is a haven for the bargain savvy and a wasteland for plastic bags.  The country doesn’t really have a fully integrated system for recycling, instead most garbage is burned or left for the stray livestock(3), and for that reason our responsible travel tour company gave us cotton travel bags for stashing our purchases.  Otherwise, those plastic bags end up littering the streets.  Thankfully, I also had a black Kiva Key Chain Convertible Tote that was given to me by my mother-in-law.  It fit in my Ameribag Classic Distressed Nylon Healthy Back Bag Tote 6102and it had a clip that I could connect to my bag that would keep me from losing it.

Or so I thought.  While we were in Mumbai, I purchased a pair of amazing, bejewled heels that I promptly lost while in Fabindia.  And guess what that large box of shoes were in?  The Kiva bag.  So, after having a fantastic time reusing a bag, I lost the one that was perfect and came back to the States, thinking I needed to get a replacement.  So after much deliberating, I ended up purchasing the Baggus.  They are the best green purchase you will ever make.

 Why didn’t I just purchase another Kiva Bag?  The Kiva bags are $10/bag and I knew I would need more for the weekly grocery trips I had.  And although the Environsax were really pretty, they were also more expensive than the Baggus.  The Baggus are $38 for 6 and if you buy them on Amazon.com, you get free shipping.  (You also get free overnight shipping with Endless.com (4))  The Baggus have a lot of benefits too: 

• The Baggu can be hung in the grocery store racks with easy and hold 2-3 times as much as a normal, disposable plastic bag.
• The Baggu’s wide straps make them easy to carry.
• The Baggu is made of lightweight, compressible nylon that can be compressed into  small spaces. 
• They are individually packed in pouches, but you can fit 4-5 Baggus in one pouch giving greater portability and ease.  (I just unfold all 5 bags onto the checkout counter!  No individual unwrapping like with Envirosax!)
• The Baggu comes with extremely bright colors, making them difficult to lose.  (I purchased orange bags and haven’t lost one yet!)
• The Baggu is a great lunch tote, able to carry lots of food and completely compressible for the journey home.

I recommend the Baggu Brights Reusable Shopping Tote – 6-Pack, because they’re so bright and you get them for $6.33/bag. 

1. All of my cotton grocery bags have lost their shape after washing. They are still usable, but obviously not as cool.
2. You can’t recycle plastic bags with Baltimore City, you need to collect them and take them to the grocery store.  All of the grocery stores in the city have a plastic bag collection bin (if they don’t, speak to the manager).  The plastic bags are recycled into new bags, or into Trex Decking.  Most bags are made up of polyethylene, one of the easiest materials to recycle.
3. Pigs, Cows, Goats are left in the streets and they eat the organic materials left by the people in their garbage.  It’s actually not the worst idea – it’s definitely a more green way of disposing garbage – but the animals aren’t in good health and the street stench is terrible.  Especially in the morning when the litter burnings take place.
4. I know that all of this sounds like an ad for Baggus & Amazon, but if you already purchase from Amazon, I’d like to think you wouldn’t mind purchasing through my link.  Thanks!