BALTIMORE | 1 Light Street | 364 FT | 28 FLOORS

[chris08876]

Offices, apartments in latest proposal for 1 Light Street

A 404-foot glass apartment and office tower would spring from a Light Street parking lot near the Inner Harbor under a Virginia developer's proposal put forward Tuesday.

Metropolitan Partnership Ltd.'s plans call for a 33-story building, with roughly 340 apartments and 10 floors of offices atop a 646-spot parking garage. The garage would be hidden behind a stone facade about as tall as the neighboring Thomas Building, a historic French Renaissance-style structure owned by McDonald's Corp., which has a restaurant on the ground floor.

The current proposal for 1 Light Street adds 10 floors of offices to the plans for a 22-story, $110 million apartment project presented last summer, when the Baltimore Development Corp. backed $28 million in bonds to help pay for the parking garage.

The addition of office floors in the tower plan likely reflects interest in the office space, possibly from M&T Bank. The bank's leases at 25 S. Charles St. and at Montgomery Park are set to expire in 2016 and a bank official attended Tuesday's meeting.

"We don't comment on negotiations that are not yet complete," said David Gillece, regional managing principal of DTZ, which is handling the search for M&T.

The company expects to remain in downtown Baltimore, said spokesman Phil Hosmer, who declined to say if the company is negotiating to lease the 1 Light Street offices.

"It's for further development of the financial district," Metropolitan CEO Cary M. Euwer Jr. told city officials Tuesday. "It supports what we're doing at 10 Light."

Metropolitan is converting the historic Bank of America building at 10 Light Street into apartments. Euwer declined to comment on the project beyond his public remarks.

Development on the 1 Light Street site, where the Southern Hotel stood until it was demolished in 2000, has been discussed for decades without coming to fruition. Metropolitan's entry into the project as a joint venture partner with the site's owners was hailed by city officials as a sign that something might actually happen on the lot, a key downtown block.

==============================
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business...127-story.html