Mike Merg
No Madison neighborhood ever shone more brightly than Mansion Hill in the 1890s. From the then-Governor’s Mansion to the UW-Madison president’s house, the neighborhood contained more political power and intellectual influence than any other neighborhood in the state.
And some pretty nice houses, too — including a dozen that are registered city landmarks.
Start your walk on North Frances Street, where some of the state’s leading intellectuals once lived. Frederick Jackson Turner built a frame house at 629 Frances St. in 1893, the year he made national news by declaring the western frontier had closed. Next door was mathematics professor, later alderman, dean of the graduate school and co-founder of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Charles S. Slichter. And across the street, at 630, lived the brilliant geologist Charles Van Hise. When UW President Charles Kendall Adams retired due to failing health in 1901, the “Frances Street Cabal” engineered Van Hise’s appointment as his successor. Only Turner’s house remains standing today.
Head north on Langdon around the bend. At 211 Langdon St. lived lumberman-philanthropist and park namesake Thomas E. Brittingham, the richest man in Madison when he died in 1924. This mansion is gone, but his Dunmuvin estate in the Highlands remains, and serves as the residence for the university president.
At 151 Langdon (no longer standing) lived the only teacher Frank Lloyd Wright respected, Allan Darst Conover, supervising architect for the Armory/Gymnasium (“the Red Gym”), the dedication of which sparked statewide celebration in May 1894.
Wright’s first major project in Madison — a beautiful boathouse at the Mendota end of Carroll Street — had opened just a month before. Commissioned by the Madison Improvement Association — founded by John Olin (who lived at 762 Langdon, no longer standing), with several neighbors on the board — the public facility had gazebo towers and a gracefully curving roof. Wright left his family’s home on Livingston Street and moved to Chicago in 1887. When the boathouse was razed in 1926, no one even noted who the architect had been.
A single block on Langdon was home to both the era’s most important jurist — the progressive Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice John Winslow at number 131 — and its most beloved — Justice Burr Jones at number 112 (home no longer standing).
Two of their neighbors were immigrants: the president of the German-American Bank, John J. Suhr, who built a fine French Second Empire residence at 121 Langdon (a city landmark); and the Norwegian industrialist-diplomat Halle Steensland, who lived in a massive Queen Anne still extant at 146 until he moved to an equally fine red brick house at 315 N. Carroll St. (That house, also a city landmark, was just recently moved around the corner to front on Gorham Street.)
The new Edgewater towers over the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Langdon Street. In the late 19th century, one of Wisconsin’s seats in the U.S. Senate bounced back and forth across Wisconsin Avenue near this site, as William F. Vilas, 12 E. Gilman St., took the post in 1891 from John C. Spooner, 150 Langdon, who took it back six years later.
Mike Merg
But the stolid Vilas mansion, the only home in Madison where a sitting U.S. president has slept (Grover Cleveland, for whom Vilas served as Secretary of the Interior in 1887), is gone. The imposing house on the hill overlooking the lake was razed in 1963, after the university declined to accept its donation from Vilas’ heirs.
Next, zig-zag over to the corner of North Pinckney and East Gilman streets. Here the towering sandstone Italianate villa with gingerbread-bedecked balconies and formal gardens at 423 N. Pinckney brought industrial and political power together better than any other single structure. Here lived the families of implement dealer Morris Fuller (whose factory office lives on as the new Pasqual’s on East Washington Avenue) and his son-in-law, mayor, state senator and future Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Robert Bashford.
Just a few steps down Pinckney Street, a rambling white brick Italianate with lovely period garden at 102 E. Gorham was home to another former mayor and statewide party boss — Elisha Keyes, also a powerful regent and postmaster who served from the Lincoln administration to Theodore Roosevelt’s.
Turn right and walk two blocks down Gorham to the stately late Victorian brick building with multiple gables and distinctive porches at 401 N. Carroll. Built for parks philanthropist Daniel K. Tenney, this was home for many years to another former mayor — the elegant industrialist, powerful UW regent and ballfield namesake Breese J. Stevens. Like fellow former mayor Bashford, Stevens married a daughter of factory owner Morris Fuller; tragically, Emma Curtis Fuller Stevens died in childbirth in 1870.
The presidents of all five of the city’s banks lived within these blocks, including the First National Bank’s Napoleon Bonaparte Van Slyke, who had a leading but checkered role in the city’s governance in the 1850s and ’60s. His distinctive Italianate sandstone in the next block at 510 N. Carroll features outstanding stonework, using a distinctive German technique possibly unique to this region, in which large blocks alternate with smaller stones, with the whole wall then covered in raised mortar.
The neighborhood even saw a second generation of greatness. Just around the corner at 15 W. Gilman St., the boy who would become Madison’s most versatile architect, Frank Riley, lived with parents Eliza and Ed (Dad was executive secretary for the Board of Regents). Right across the street, at 14 W. Gilman, April 17, 1897, brought the birth of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Thornton Wilder, whose play Our Town would chronicle the ordinary folk of Grover’s Corners, a world very different from the neighborhood of senators and bank presidents he grew up in.
Stu Levitan is the chair of the Madison Landmarks Commission.
