The Cordish Co. revealed plans yesterday to spend $51 million to buy and overhaul Reisterstown Road Plaza in Northwest Baltimore, an effort that could bring stores in short supply to the city and restore some luster to a once-thriving shopping center that's been on the decline for years.

Coming are a full-service Giant Food supermarket and a Marshalls discount department store, said David S. Cordish, head of the Baltimore company that has been recruiting tenants behind the scenes for a year.

Just opened is a Home Depot home improvement store, which was announced last year by the plaza owners, a partnership led by Continental Realty Corp.

"It's a great spot that just needs some freshening up," said Cordish, who said he used to live near the 40-year-old plaza and shop there in its heyday. "We think it's a very important property for the city and the neighborhoods around it. It has tremendous potential."

Cordish will bring the total square footage to 772,400 square feet, up more than 100,000 square feet, including the new Home Depot. In comparison, The Mall in Columbia is 1.35 million square feet and the Owings Mills mall is 1.2 million square feet.

The center, off Reisterstown Road between Northern Parkway and the Baltimore County line, will have free-standing stores and an enclosed mall. A new food court is in the works that will serve the office workers in the plaza as well as area residents, Cordish said.

A Furniture Palace is scheduled to open next month in a building formerly occupied by a Hecht's department store. That building also houses a Burlington Coat Factory and a half-dozen other retail and office tenants. An Applebee's restaurant and bar is expected to open in February and a Checkers drive-in restaurant is planned.

The faade of the complex will be redone and new signs and lights installed, Cordish said. Some construction work can be seen from Reisterstown Road.

The new tenants, who agreed to move before the overhaul was in full swing, noted neighborhood demographics as reason to locate there.

Data from the U.S. Census show that 1.138 million people live within a 10-mile radius of the center. Annual household income is $61,826, and about 14.5 percent have a graduate or professional degree. About 243,730 own their homes.

Tom Green, a manager at the new Home Depot, said he's seen people walking from neighborhoods to the store behind the main mall.

"They've been waiting for it to be here," Green said of the store, which opened Nov. 21. "I think it will bring a lot of traffic to the mall."

Home Depot has been expanding in the region. Other stores are in Owings Mills, Catonsville, Dundalk, and Glen Burnie. The new store is Home Depot's 34th in Maryland.

The 95,000-square-foot store employs about 110 people, most of them city residents, according to Home Depot. They are paid an average of $11.50 an hour plus benefits. Payroll is projected at about $4.5 million a year.

Cordish said residents have to leave Baltimore for a number of things, and that contributed to his decision to make an unsolicited offer to buy the center. The private company typically spends its money on construction, and later seeks mortgages.

The center once had Hecht's and Stewart's stores as anchors, then it had Caldor and Hechinger's. Now it has National Wholesale Liquidators and other lower-end stores.

Cordish also plans to bring apparel and other small stores to the mall. The company often recruits tenants that have stores in other Cordish properties around the country.

Leigh Kramer, a spokeswoman for Continental, said the company began the push for new tenants two or three years ago. Cordish and Kramer said several City Council members, Mayor Martin O'Malley and the Baltimore Development Corp. have aided their efforts.

"Reisterstown Road Plaza has been quietly transforming itself over the last year," said Andrew B. Frank, executive vice president of the Baltimore Development Corp., the city's economic development arm. "Earlier this year, the city helped attract Home Depot to the plaza by relocating a public utility that crossed the site. We knew at the time that Home Depot was a harbinger of great things to come. ... This announcement is the best indication yet that the neighborhoods of Northwest Baltimore are healthy and getting stronger."