A LITTLE ANNAPOLIS, A LOT OF SWEETNESS

ANNAPOLIS, DEC. 23 -- ANNAPOLIS, DEC. 23 -- Annapolis is a wonderful city. It's made of gingerbread and the streets are paved with peanuts. Parking meters are everywhere, but they're made of gumdrops. Marzipan ducks swim in the harbor and you can swallow them whole and there's a big jelly bear named Harry Hughes at the top of the State House dome.

David Perry built Annapolis in three weeks this Christmas season, using 1,100 pounds of donated goodies. The biggest buildings, the capitol and St. Anne's Episcopal Church, are more than three feet tall, and the whole thing measures about 20 feet by 20 feet. There were 60 buildings until Saturday, when 20 buildings on Main Street were eaten.

This is a Christmas story, after all, so there has to be a sad part before the happy ending.

Perry, 29, chef for the Pirate's Cove restaurant in Galesville, decided to build the big gingerbread city model he had dreamed of for years. He was going to put it on display and collect donations for the homeless. Then he would auction off the shops to raise still more funds.

But he built -- and baked -- the city so big that nobody had room for it. The shopping malls around Annapolis weren't interested, he said, and the folks at the State House told him they needed four months' notice to put something on display.

Eventually, a developer living in the semi-abandoned Wraxeter Mansion north of Annapolis offered a room for the city. "We have no mice," boasted the developer, Philip Crifasi Jr.

But even the big mansion room wasn't big enough. When guests arrived for a charity Christmas party Saturday, they were asked to eat Main Street.

The guests stuffed donations through a crack in the roof of Farmer's National Bank by the city dock. The donations are visible through the clear gelatin windows.

Perry didn't break into the bank to count the money, but he knew things weren't shaping up as profitably as he had hoped. Next year, he figures, he will have to hire a public relations agent and make a model of wealthy Georgetown.

Musing over his problem at a local bar, a fellow drinker came up with a solution. "Here I was trying to find a home for it, and the whole meaning of Christmas kind of dropped," he said. "What a great thing to let the homeless devour the town that had no home."

So Perry called Mitch Snyder at the Community for Creative Non-Violence in the District, which holds a big Christmas Eve dinner for about 2,000 homeless each year. And so today -- Christmas Eve -- Annapolis will be trucked to the District.

Then the State House, the Ralph Lauren Polo Shop with its candy shutters, Sadler's Hardware with its rows of marzipan rakes, shovels and garbage cans on display, and Britches Great Outdoors with a candy bird's nest on the roof will be eaten up. "It will be like a horror film," Perry laughed. "Annapolis gets devoured by the homeless." Only a few of the gingerbread shops, which have been bought by their real namesakes for public display, and St. Anne's Church, which will be given to the church, will be spared destruction. "That's kind of a sad thing to do -- destroy the church," Perry said.

But not the State House, with its gingerbread pillars and white mint dome and its jelly bear named after Maryland's governor. Perry said he's going to fill its hollow halls with candies and let Mitch Snyder take the first swipe.

"I haven't seen it yet, but the dimensions are very impressive," said Snyder, who reckons Annapolis will be a tasty follow-up to a dinner of turkey, ham, ribs and chicken. "It will be the first time a group of homeless people ate a city, but what the hell."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.