Last September, Robert Sapero and Vic Cheswick thought they had a deal. Cheswick agreed to pay Sapero $2 million for the long-vacant Chesapeake Restaurant in the 1700 block of North Charles Street, and wrote a $50,000 check as a down payment.

Then the plot thickened. A month later, the city?s Board of Estimates voted to condemn the landmark eatery and two adjoining properties, pay Sapero the parcel?s “appraised value” of $770,000, and ultimately transfer it to people it liked better: Alan and Michael Shecter of Tower Hill Development, whose $47.5 million plan for the site, dubbed Chesapeake Square, had earlier won the favor of the Baltimore Development Corporation, a quasi-governmental urban renewal agency.