Gretchen McKay

With the Steelers one step higher on the Stairway to Seven, we know you’re more than ready for some football. Here’s what you might still be trying to figure out: What to eat when they take on the New York Jets in the AFC championship game Sunday at Heinz Field? Just a blessed few make […]

ST. MICHAELS, Md. — You don’t have to be a crab fisherman, or even like crab, to appreciate everything this Victorian resort town on Maryland’s eastern shore has to offer. Blessed with charming shops and restaurants, an interesting Colonial back story and some of the region’s prettiest early 19th-century architecture — St. Mary’s Square, where […]

KIDRON, Ohio — To the scores of tourists who travel to the sprawling but somehow-still-charming hardware store that put this tiny farming community on the map a half-century ago, Jay Lehman is a local version of Bill Gates, an astute businessman who grew a tiny niche market into a global enterprise. The rural store that […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Abraham Lincoln was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet more than 144 years ago. Yet standing in front of the long black double-breasted frockcoat he wore to Ford’s Theatre that night in April 1865, its plain gray buttons almost within touching distance behind a thick sheet of glass, our 16th president looms […]

MOUNT AIRY, N.C. — Product placement is so ubiquitous today that most television viewers don’t even notice it. Back when sponsor Ford Motor Co. decided to showcase its Ford Galaxie 500 sedan on CBS’s “The Andy Griffith Show,” though, it was still a novel idea. It quickly caught on. “There was a new police car […]

It’s often difficult to pinpoint the one design detail that sets the course of major home renovation. For Tom and Hannah Hardy, it started with figuring out what kind of lights would best show off a planned remodel of their North Side kitchen. “He called under the pretext of lighting fixtures,” architect Peter Margittai recalls, […]