Fifth Avenue Palaces Part II

The physician who served Millionaires Row built Sunnyledge in 1888 to house his home and office. It now holds a small hotel and restaurant.

Welcome back to my tour of the remnants of Pittsburgh’s Millionaires Row. My first stop is Sunnyledge.

Dr. James McClelland, the founder of Shadyside Hospital and the physician for the Carnegie, Frick, Mellon and Scaife families – some of his future  neighbors on Fifth Avenue, wanted nothing to do with the Queen Anne design for a proposed new house.

Instead, he turned to Longfellow, Arden and Harlow, a successor firm to architect H.H. Richardson and the creators of the Carnegie Library and Museums in Oakland, to draw up a suitable structure for his office and home. It was completed in 1888.

The doctor's office was in the turreted corner tower and had a separate porch and entrance.

One of the McClellands' daughters spent 94 years in the house and had planned to make the building, which remained unchanged over the years, into a private house museum upon her death. However, the curator  Ms. McClelland selected soon followed her in death and the furnishings were auctioned.

In 1997, Sunnyledge underwent a conversion that created the small hotel and restaurant that occupies this jewel on the corner of Fifth and Wilkins avenue today.

The oldest remaining structure on Millionaires Row is the Howe-Childs Gate House, which is now part of Chatham University.

An entry in the Council of Independent Colleges' Historic Campus Architecture Project describes it:

Constructed ca. 1861 and originally known as Willow Cottage, the Howe-Childs Gate House is the oldest wood frame house in Pittsburgh and the oldest existing house from the city's ‘Millionaire's Row. Built by Thomas Marshall Howe, a prominent Pittsburgh industrialist, bank president and former congressman, the building was the entry to Greystone the family's ‘country’ estate. Mary Howard Childs, the widowed daughter of the General, and her three children were the first known occupants of the house.

Former owners of the two and one-half story clapboard Gothic Revival/cottage style house include members of the Howe and Childs families and also that of Pittsburgh oil magnate, Michael L. Benedum. In the 1950s the Benedum Foundation leased the house to Chatham College and in 1959 the foundation donated the house to the university for use as a residence hall and academic building. The university later sold the house in 1985. One year later the City of Pittsburgh designated the structure a Pittsburgh Historic Landmark.

After nearly 15 years of deterioration, Chatham University re-acquired the house and grounds in 2000 and without delay began to ensure its survival. To save the structure, the university immediately invested $2.2 million into the exterior and interior renovations and the renewal of the grounds. ... The restored exterior has created a gracious entrance to the campus while the fully renovated interior includes a conference room and guest rooms for campus visitors.

Fortunately, it was a happy ending for a large piece of Pittsburgh history.

The final stop in this trip down Millionaires Row is the Edmond and Pauline Mudge House, which is now the Mudge Graduate House of Carnegie Mellon University.

Although it looks to be newer, the structure on the corner of Fifth and Morewood  avenues was built in 1922 for the Mudges, who then donated it to CMU in 1958.

This is how architecture historian and Pitt professor Franklin Toker described Mudge House in his book “Buildings of Pittsburgh”:

"The smooth limestone mansion was the last of its generation to be built on Fifth Avenue. The house has a symmetrical facade, with large curved bays that extend three floors in height on each side of the one-story , semicircular portico. ...

"Sympathetically extended with echoing wings when it became a college dormitory in the 1960s, Mudge House remains one of Shadyside's essential visual anchors."

Another notable stop on Fifth Avenue – the McCook House and an adjoining Tudor house,  now known as Mansions on Fifth – will be featured in a future post. I figured any house that had scandal, an elopement, religious conversion and a reconciliation in its past deserved its own entry.