1917 Seneca Avenue
2024 Palladium Tour: Landmarks & Landscapes
1917 Seneca Avenue
One of a handful of Columbia landmarks in Wales Garden, 1917 Seneca Avenue commands a prominent location within the heart of Edwin Wales Robertson’s early twentieth-century upscale suburb. Designed in the Neoclassical style by architect James Brite of the New York firm of Bacon & Brite, who also planned Columbia’s first skyscraper (today’s Barringer Building), this residence was born out of love, delayed by war, and made into a home by two of the capital city’s influential families.
The groundwork for 1917 Seneca Avenue was figuratively cut following the marriage of Evelyn Perkins Robertson (1889-1969) to Joseph Berry Sloan Lyles (1885-1963) in January 1917. Showered with expensive gifts adorning the billiard room of Laurel Hill, the Robertson family’s sprawling Arsenal Hill mansion, the newly wedded, socially prominent couple were poised for a promising life together. Not long thereafter, Edwin Wales Robertson bestowed one further wedding gift upon his daughter and new son-in-law with the announcement of a future home he would have built for the couple within Wales Garden. Construction began at 1917 Seneca Avenue within the year; however, progress stalled from October 1918 until January 1921 due to an inability to obtain marble from Europe in the wake of the First World War.
Replete with architectural allusions recalling classical Greek and Roman architecture, Brite’s design for the wedding-present residence conveyed strength and time-tested style executed within a palette of red masonry walls and buff-gray colored marble. Through his attention to classical sensibilities of appropriate proportions and order, Brite’s approach to the home’s aesthetic proved as successful as the building’s solid masonry construction was robust. Among the building’s most prominent facets is its two-story, semi-circular portico, supported by four fluted Doric columns that terminate gracefully in an entablature festooned with guttae and a cornice comprised of egg-and-date-molding surmounted by acanthus-leaved brackets.
With their Wales Garden residence completed by early 1921, the then-thirty-six-year-old lawyer and his thirty-one-year-old wife further embraced their privileged lifestyle within the new, segregated suburb. Although barred from owning or renting property within Wales Garden, Black individuals nonetheless were an integral part of daily life throughout the community and specifically at 1917 Seneca Avenue, where during the fall of 1924 Evelyn Lyles advertised in The State newspaper her family’s need for a live-in “reliable colored nurse,” whom she required to provide “recommendations.” Following the death of her husband in 1963, Eveyln remained in the family’s home until selling the property to Dr. Gustaf Munthe Gudmundson, an orthopedic surgeon, and his wife, Elizabeth Murphy Gudmundson.
In December 1967, The State newspaper published a picture of Dr. Gudmundson and sons, Arthur and Gus, unloading their family’s Christmas tree in front of “Seneca Place,” as they called the former Lyles residence. On March 2, 1979, a little less than five years after the death of Dr. Gudmundson at age 49, the Department of the Interior listed the family’s property in the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural and historic significance.
In 2020, Dr. Frank J. Penna became the second surgeon and only the third person to own the Lyles-Gudmundson House. Frank’s vision for his new “old” home is to amplify the building’s character-defining facets through sensitive rehabilitation work that will allow him to reverse modifications made in the 1960s and add his own decorative flavor.
"Before" Photo Gallery
The circa 2020 images above were pulled from CMLS listing 489892. Listing agent Katherine Robinson of Weaver Realty LLC.
