It looks like a hurricane thwacked South Baltimore - at least the weedy stretch under the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge.
Abandoned boats rot in the tall grass, seemingly flung from the water. A cabin cruiser named Adam's Rib is now nobody's wreck. Broken glass, tubing and boat innards litter the ground.
The grandly named Baltimore Yacht Basin marina, while still open to boaters, has seen better days. So has the building that housed the late Daniel "Cap'n Dan" Davis' raucous Dead Eye Saloon. It sits vacant under a sign that says "estaurant," flanked by dead palm trees.
Now a revival might be at hand for both marina and restaurant. This time, those involved promise none of the bickering with myriad agencies that dogged Davis' reign over the 3-acre complex, wedged in an industrial area between Hanover Street and an insulation factory.
Yesterday, the Board of Estimates approved the sale of the city-owned marina to developers who promise to fix it up, haul out unwanted or sunken boats and open a seafood restaurant. It will be geared, more or less, to the same blue-collar crowd that packed the Dead Eye until it closed in 1998.
"It's not going to be fancy - coat and ties not allowed," said Anthony J. Ambridge, a former city councilman who is part of a development team led by Tom Chagouris, owner of Nick's Inner Harbour Seafood at Cross Street Market.
"But it's not going to be like a biker bar," Ambridge said. "It's going to be a good restaurant with a casual dining experience."
The city is eager to hand over the Port Covington property. Not only will the new restaurant and other changes generate tax dollars, they may save the marina, officials say.
"Without some investment in this place, it's going to disappear, it's going to be nothing," said JoAnn Copes, the city's assistant housing commissioner for development.
Copes said it's no mystery why the Chagouris-led bid was the only one the city got: "There are not that many people willing to take on an oddball project like this. It's in very bad shape."
The purchase price is $375,000, but the city will knock off $75,000 to help cover the cleanup. The new owners will pay the city $50,000 upfront, then enjoy an 18-month payment-free period as they get the restaurant up and running.
Then, after a second 18-month period when only interest will be due, the owners will begin paying the balance over 15 years at 7 percent interest.
Ambridge said the group will put $1.3 million into the restaurant and spend several hundred thousand more dollars to restore the marina, a process that could take three years. During that time, the marina will stay open. Other partners include developer Ronald Lipscomb, Richard Leitch, who works with Chagouris, and real estate broker John Wilhide, according to Ambridge.
To the regulars who haunt the marina, the news is great.
"We've been looking for it to happen," said Tom Berry, trimming his fingernails with a pocketknife as a fan sent cigarette smoke swirling around the marina office.
Berry, 65, and his old friends remember how the place rocked when Davis ran it from the mid-1980s until his death in 1997.
People came from all over to this edge of the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, said John "Ed" Appold, 67, who has worked at the marina since 1984 and oversees operations. "You could find them from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, everywhere else," he said.
Victor Klosek, who stopped in to pay for his slip, said the saloon drew factory workers but also "big shots from uptown with their suits."
And the walls - they were covered with taxidermy. "Alligators, swordfish, hammerhead sharks, raccoons, snakes," said Berry. "And rats, waterfront rats," he added, though those critters were not mounted.
Government officials also recall Davis, not as fondly. In the mid-1990s, the city claimed that he had shortchanged taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent and taxes. The city tried to evict him and later settled the matter.
Davis clashed with the Army Corps of Engineers for not obeying regulations while doing dock and deck work at the marina. And he had run-ins with the liquor board over such infractions as staging live entertainment without permission and having a beer truck dispense beer in the parking lot.
"At one point, he did kind of drive us crazy," said Jane M. Schroeder, the liquor board's deputy executive secretary. Neighbors complained often, she said, which says something considering the nearest neighbor lived blocks away.
Davis responded to his woes in unconventional ways. After his deck was deemed too big, Klosek recalled, "Dan went out with a chainsaw and cut five feet off to make it legal."
After Davis died at 58 of a heart attack, a flotilla of family and friends sailed from the Dead Eye in a last show of respect. His son, Lincoln, ran it for another year before closing the doors for good.
The marina remained open and still has more than 100 of its 170 slips in use, not counting the five spaces marked SUNK (to indicate submerged boats) on the office whiteboard.
But the place at the end of Insulator Drive looks haggard. In front of the office, the patio furniture includes the backseat of a car. The parking lot is full of boats, some being fixed and some beyond saving.
Oakley Saunders, a retiree from Northwest Baltimore who had driven down the marina to work on his 30-foot sloop, did not mind the mess.
"I would like to see it improved," he said. "But that was not my major concern. I wanted a place I could work on my boat." Fancier marinas in the Inner Harbor do not allow repair work, he said.
Nearby, under the Hanover Street bridge, the ghost ships sit ready for a convoy to nowhere. The boats were left by their owners for unknown reasons, and some languished underwater before being dragged to the ad hoc graveyard. A particularly dreary-looking houseboat is so encrusted in barnacles that it resembles armor plating. "As high as that barnacle line is," Berry said, pointing, "that's how deep it was in."
The first things to go, Ambridge said, will be these boats. And work will begin soon on the restaurant that will be called Nick's. If all goes well, it should open in the spring, in time for a new boating season.