The former Boccaccio restaurant building in Little Italy, vacant for more than 15 years, will be torn down to make way for a parking lot.
Lisa Regnante, president of the Little Italy Neighborhood Association (LINA), told members at a community meeting on Tuesday that new owners are filing an application with the city to raze the building at 923-937 Eastern Ave.
The restaurant was an upscale dining establishment that opened in 1992 and closed after owner Giovanni Rigato died in 2008. It was acquired in 2010 for $1 million by an entity linked to Peter G. Angelos, the former Orioles owner who passed away in 2024. Angelos let the property sit vacant for as long as he owned it.
The property was sold on July 30 in an online auction that was held on behalf of Angelos’ heirs. The price, after a last-minute flurry of bids, was $1,442,000 – a top bid of $1.4 million plus a three percent transaction fee. The identity of the online buyer was not immediately disclosed. State land records still show the owner as 923-937 Eastern Avenue LLC, the group affiliated with Angelos’ heirs.
In addition to the nearly 9,000-square-foot restaurant building, the 0.318-acre property at Eastern Avenue and Exeter Street includes a 20-car parking lot.
Regnante told LINA members that the buyer is an entity “associated with the Bagby Building” on the next block. She said the new owners intend to raze the Boccaccio building and expand the existing parking lot to serve tenants of the Bagby Building across the street.
The four-story, 93,000-square-foot building at 509 S. Exeter St. has multiple commercial tenants, including Baltimore Sun Media, and an annex with four restaurants that are part of the Atlas Restaurant Group.
“The people who bought it are associated with the Bagby Building and they’re going to use it for a parking lot for the tenants in the Bagby Building, and I heard it’ll be used in another way with one of the restaurants,” Regnante said. “The good news is that the building is going to be demolished…That eyesore is going to be gone. It could be six weeks, and it’ll be gone.”
That will be an improvement over the current condition, she said.
“Because it’s a parking lot,” she said, “there will be parking attendants and security and lights and a gate so that area will no longer look like it looks and it will have people there when we’re walking, especially at night when we’re coming to and from the neighborhood. So that’s a big win for the neighborhood.”
Built in 1902 as home of the Bagby Furniture Company, the Bagby building was repurposed for office use more than 20 years ago by Struever Bros., Eccles and Rouse, which sold it in 2007. It’s now part of the real estate portfolio controlled by WorkShop Development, a company headed by Doug Schmidt, Neil Tucker and Richard Manekin. According to state land records, the Bagby Building’s official owner is Skylar Development LLC. Another address is 1010 Fleet St.
Tammy Hawley, Chief of Strategic Communications for Baltimore’s housing department, said in an email message that she isn’t aware of any demolition permits issued for the Eastern Avenue property “as of yet.”
The land is zoned for commercial use, which allows surface parking, and the building isn’t protected by landmark designation. Regnante acknowledged that the new owners may decide someday to construct a building on the Boccaccio parcel but said that isn’t part of their current plans. “For now,” she said, a parking lot is “what it’s going to be.”
This is zoned C-5-DE, wouldn’t that require a city ordinance?