Another apartment getting ready to launch at Locust Point

At the city’s emerging new hotspot, Locust Point, the new apartments and retail at McHenry Row are filling with tenants and retailers. Spies there say about six of the 250 apartments in the development are being rented each week, with tenants paying rents that average nearly $2,600 a month for a two-bedroom pad.

The development by Mark Sapperstein unofficially opened Dec. 7 with the ribbon cutting for the Harris Teeter grocery store, the 61,000-square-foot anchor of the commercial side of the project that also includes a strip of shops, salons and restaurants and a Greene Turtle bar.

In the meantime, another project is getting ready to launch.

A 200-unit apartment development with street-level retail at near Lawrence Street and Fort Avenue is in the planning phase, with a ground breaking in the near future. That’s the former site of the General Electric plant. The development will be considered by the Locust Point Civic Association this spring.

Around the bend of Key Highway, Under Armour is getting ready to embark on a massive expansion at the Tide Point complex.

This week, a company executive testified before a City Council committee about the expansion project in a hearing about changing the planned unit development there for the office expansion and rename the PUD Under Armour Headquarters. The full City Council will hear the proposal Monday evening.

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This week, NAIOP named Randall M. Griffin as winner of its Maryland Lifetime Achievement Award to be given out an awards gala on April 19 at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore.

Griffin will retire as CEO of Corporate Office Properties Trust at the end of this month after a nearly four-decade career in the commercial real estate business. For the past 19 years, he has headed the Constellation Real Estate Group and its successor, Corporate Office Properties Trust, or COPT. Before that, he was vice president of development for EuroDisney in Paris.

Locally, Griffin helped to develop a memorial for Maryland victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks located in front of the World Trade Center building on the city’s waterfront.

“With his track record of success, highly-refined managerial skills and real estate acumen that has helped create among the most successful real estate investment trusts in the country, Rand epitomizes the definition of this award,” said Dianna Wilhelm, president of NAIOP Maryland.

Griffin joins good company. Past lifetime achievement winners include David Bavar, of Bavar Properties Group; Clay Emory, of Emory Hill Real Estate; Bernard and Harold Manekin, of Manekin LLC; Leroy Merritt, of Merritt Properties LLC; and Ed St. John, owner of St. John Properties Inc.

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Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Waverly Main Street office at 427½ Merryman Lane, community leaders will gather to unveil a marker noting the historic African American Public School No. 115 that once stood at the location. Today, the site is near the popular Saturday farmer’s market in Waverly.

History books show that in 1889, the Baltimore City Public Schools’ Colored Division opened School No. 115 there in the form of three buildings that housed grades 1-6, attracting as many as 250 African American students each year. The school was the launching pad for one of the first African Americans to eventually teach in the Baltimore City Public Schools, Roberta Sheridan.

School No. 115 closed in the late 1950s. One of its alumnae was Betty Williams, who grew up on Barclay Street and rose to become principal of Eastern High School from 1970-77 — a school that she was not allowed to attend as a student because of segregation. Williams will be on hand for the dedication.

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Roadnet Technologies Inc. has signed a new lease for expanded office space at 849 Fairmount Avenue in Towson. The 150 employees of the vehicle routing and scheduling company at that location will soon occupy 31,158 square feet in their new digs. David Fields of CB Richard Ellis represented the company and Bill Carbaugh represented the landlord in this transaction.

Roadnet Technologies was founded in 1983 to provide fleet management solutions and route optimization for hundreds of thousands of vehicles in a broad range of industries such as food service, beverage, paper, waste management, textile and energy. The company’s routing software was acquired by United Parcel Service in 1986 and renamed UPS Logistics Technologies.

Thoma Bravo LLC, a private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco, purchased the UPS division in late 2010 and re-established the original corporate name.

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Manekin LLC announced this week that a former football coach will join its ranks as a commercial leasing agent.

Scott Manhoff will come aboard as a vice president in the brokerage division in the Columbia office. Manhoff will focus on commercial sales and leasing in the metro area. He had worked in the brokerage firms Grubb & Ellis and McShea & Co.

An announcement said that in his prior life, Manhoff was a “headhunter,” or professional talent scout, and a football coach at Brown University, Grambling State University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Marietta College.

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TIDBITS: JCPenney will open an 85,775-square foot store in the Boulevard at Boxhill development in Abingdon this fall, near the new Wegmans and other retail … Next Tuesday at 10 a.m., Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake officials will join Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake at a groundbreaking ceremony at Orchard Ridge for 30 new Habitat homes at the northeast Baltimore community. The establishments at downtown Power Plant Live! development are hiring. A job fair will be held on Wednesday from 4-7 p.m. … Merritt Properties recently inked a new lease with the Chesapeake Fine Food Group LLC, a gourmet food mail order business. The company will occupy 6,300 square feet at 10711 Red Run Boulevard in Owings Mills.