Baltimore’s YouthWorks program began its 50th year of operations this week. The month-long initiative aims to address violence and poverty among city youth, and now serves as a template for cities around the country working on similar objectives. YouthWorks is spearheaded by the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, which works to place Baltimore residents ages 14 to 21 in various workplaces around the city for five weeks. Participants will earn Maryland’s current minimum wage of $13.25 an hour.

 

Two Maryland hotels have made Travel + Leisure’s list of the top 10 resorts in the mid-Atlantic. The Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore came in at no. 4 on the 2023 list while the Annapolis Waterfront Hotel ranked No. 8. The Inn at Perry Cabin has ranked every year since the list debuted while the Annapolis hotel made the list for the first time this year.

Long before the Chesapeake Bay or I-95 corridor etched the land that would be Maryland, an enormous carnivorous dinosaur lived and died here. About 115 million years later, staff and volunteers at Prince George’s County’s Dinosaur Park say they have unearthed a tibia, or shin bone, belonging to that apex predator of the Early Cretaceous period.

From the corner of West Baltimore Street and Summit Avenue, you can see the future of baseball in the Hub City. There aren’t any home runs flying yet. But next Spring, the cranes and construction workers will be gone. The 6.25-acre site in Downtown Hagerstown will be changed into a ballpark with a capacity for about 3,000 fans. It will be a ballpark that reflects the history and traditions of this hard-working city of 43,000 people, according to planners.

For the Birds of the 1960s, 1970s or even the early 1980s, contending was a given, and teams playing at Memorial Stadium were populated by future Hall-of-Famers like the Robinsons — Frank and Brooks — or Jim Palmer, Boog Powell or Paul Blair. But it’s now been 40 years since the Baltimore Orioles appeared in the World Series, nine years since they won a playoff series and seven years since they last made the playoffs, losing in the wild card round.

As German grocer Lidl closes one Baltimore-area store, another may finally be set to open. The discount grocery chain announced on Tuesday it was shuttering its store in Brooklyn Park in Anne Arundel County on Sunday because it was “underperforming.” However, early next year, the company is eyeing the grand opening of another local Lidl at 5950 Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore to replace a long-time independent market, spokesman Chandler Spivey said.

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts has agreed to pay its former executive director, Donna Drew Sawyer, an $83,232 settlement in exchange for her resignation as the leader of the city’s embattled arts council. Though Sawyer stepped down Jan. 10, four days after Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott called publicly for her ouster as CEO of the arts council known as BOPA, the settlement agreement wasn’t inked until May 11.

Baltimore City Council members scrutinized Baltimore Gas and Electric Company’s controversial gas regulator relocation project during a two-hour hearing Wednesday night, posing some of the same questions residents have asked in a lawsuit against the utility. BGE is looking to replace more than 11,200 indoor gas regulators, devices that maintain a set pressure of a gas system, with external models by the end of 2031.

Perhaps the way Brooklyn came to be part of the city of Baltimore is symbolic of the way residents sometimes feel about their neighborhood today. Although there are many things they love about where they live, they say they sometimes feel shut off from the city and an afterthought to more known neighborhoods in the same district, such as Locust Point and Federal Hill, which tend to be more vocal and politically active.

The 11 News I-Team obtained the most comprehensive data so far that details how many youths that curfew staff have interacted with each night since the curfew program began over Memorial Day weekend. While the numbers aren’t perfect — they don’t tell everything about how the team of social workers, school police and others are engaging with youths who are staying out past the permitted times — but they are the most substantive data made available so far.