The Whittlesey House
201 Highland Park Circle SE, 1903, Charles Whittlesey

Who would expect to find a Norwegian log cabin in the heart of the Southwest? Yet here one is and has been since 1903, when its owner/architect Charles Whittlesey built it for his family. One of his daughters remembered "the big log house on the edge of the mesa" and its large living room "with an immense fireplace with log stumps on the hearth where we used to crack nuts..." She recalled a 10-foot veranda surrounding the living room on three sides: "It was all very beautiful with a marvelous view."

Whittlesey is best known as the architect of the city's famed and much-mourned Alvarado Hotel. He was also known as a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete. His home on the mesa edge is similar in materials and design to another Santa Fe Railway hotel, El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. El Tovar was designed by Whittlesey in the same year he built this house. The buildings share log-cut walls, Norwegian style cutout railings edging wide verandas and recessed window seats.

The house is also closely identified with Clifford Hall MacCallum, a nurse who had come West with a convalescing T.B. patient and stayed on to become head nurse at the Sanitarium. The story goes she informed a suitor that if he bought the house for her she would marry him, which he did in 1920. She lived here for 40 years, often remodeling the interior and carefully maintaining it so that the house became a local showplace, a gathering spot for artists and writers. In 1960 it was sold to a fraternity and was later used as a home for indigent men. The Albuquerque Press Club bought the property in 1973 and operates it as a professional and social club.

A fire in 1974, due to the wiring, destroyed the old bar and kitchen wing on the southwest corner of the building. Since then a long range plan for improvements to the building was made to help preserve the building from further damage.