One of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s finest homes, The Sayre Mansion is a link to the city’s industrial past.

Credit: The Sayre Mansion

Long before we enjoyed our modern swift means of transportation and luxuriated in our new work at home era, living close to the job was the next best thing. Robert H. Sayre knew that well, and wisely built his fine 1858 mansion within short distance of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s vast steelworks that came to define much of industrial America. As the closest of associates of industrialist Asa Packer, Sayre rose from chief engineer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad to becoming a founding hand at the company that developed into the behemoth Bethlehem Steel. He spent a full half century in his home that is today The Sayre Mansion inn. And just as surely was the case when society ladies were taking tea in the parlor with his wife (there were four Mrs. Sayres over time), your well-behaved dog is most welcome here too.

A Member of Historic Hotels of America, the Gothic Revival Sayre Mansion sits on two acres in Bethlehem’s Fountain Hill district, many of whose homes built by the elite of the day still stand. The inn overlooks the 101-year-old steel truss Hill to Hill Bridge over the Lehigh tributary of the Delaware River. Spreading itself further uphill in the opposite direction, Lehigh University owes its very existence to Sayre’s instrumental development efforts.

You might find it hard to leave the Sayre Mansion glass-roofed Conservatory (Room 30).

Credit: The Sayre Mansion

Like any small property that exudes a proper B&B spirit, the 19-room, four-suite Sayre Mansion encourages guests to gather and strangers to make new friends—it helps that there’s always snacks, fresh coffee and port wine on hand. While you recline on antique sofas in front of the fireplace with its original shell or on comfy armchairs by the windows, you might play chess or board games. Your dog lying at your feet will be content to charm and lap up attention from other guests.

After Robert Sayre’s early-20th-century death, the mansion served for a decade as a Lehigh University frat house before being converted into apartments for half a century. Consequently, the Sayre upstairs holds a warren of smaller rooms than it did in its heyday, a common result for many historic homes that have suffered years of neglect. Happily, it was ultimately saved from demolition in the late 1980s by a couple who restored it and turned it into an inn.

Drawing from her fount of historical anecdotes, General Manager Sarah Trimmer will recount how Sayre’s widow Martha auctioned off the home’s entire contents, including sadly that of his magnificent three-story library, which included among its 15,000 books a copy of Audubon’s The Birds of America.

The library was an 1898 addition to the home. Its stacks are long gone, but its fine coffered ceiling was rediscovered during renovations and belongs now to Rooms 20 and 21 that were built over the balustrade level. Above those rooms, the Conservatory (Room 30) is flooded in light through its glass roof. The ground floor Room 11 holds Sayre’s office; one might wonder, though, if he spent more time in his elegant library consulting with his personal librarian.

Robert Sayre, right, in his enormous private library that was part of a later addition to The Sayre Mansion. The coffered ceiling still exists.

Credit: The Sayre Mansion

The Sayre house’s bones are still there, from the owner’s wine cellar to the thick granite walls and brick vaulted ceilings in the addition’s basement. An enormous carriage house has also been made into suites (with an EV charging station in front).

Bit by bit, management has sourced furnishings from earlier eras, some having been donated by local families. Hanging as part of the Room 21 decor, an elaborately-illustrated 1840s baptismal certificate is written in old German Fraktur, a Gothic script that was popular with Pennsylvania Germans.

The German text is a reminder of the Bethlehem Moravian origins, the city having been founded by German speakers from what is today the Czech Republic on land that was home to Lenape Indians. The Moravian Church Settlements are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, while the Central Bethlehem Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Built in 1758, the Main Street Sun Inn hosted Washington and Lafayette and is today a tavern and small museum. Down by the river, The Wooden Match bar and grill takes up the former train station, and with its mansard roof looks right out of a French village. Their slogan of Beer, Meat, Cigars promises exactly what your options are as soon as you sit down under the covered seating alongside the old train tracks.

With its original fireplace shell, The Sayre Mansion parlor has managed to maintain its historic roots.

Credit: The Sayre Mansion

On the Sayre inn side of the city, the South Bethlehem Downtown Historic District is likewise on the National Register of Historic Places. Vis-à-vis the mansion, the Cathedral Church of the Nativity—another Sayre sponsored construction—is known for its fine collection of stained glass windows.

With the Sayre’s prime setting on a hillock, guests have a clear view of the intact former Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces a few miles away. Known now as the SteelStacks arts and culture complex, the site includes the nearly-ten-year old National Museum of Industrial History, the first museum to be granted an affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution. The marvelous exhibitions in the steelwork’s former electric repair shop are worthy of several hours time, from massive industrial steam engines down to displays of local silk and textile production.

Currently, an ambitious project is underway turning the entire top floor into more exhibit and an event space. At the stacks themselves, the nearly half-mile-long elevated Hoover-Mason Trestle, now lined with garden plantings, was once the railroad line that delivered iron ore to the blast furnaces. Even on a peaceful sunset walk below the 230-foot-tall illuminated stacks, it’s not hard to imagine the massive scale of a century’s-worth of intensely-hot, ear-splitting dangerous work that tens of thousands of steelworkers endured here. Many of the other steel mill facilities that are still in a state of glorious ruin are owned now by the onsite Wind Creek Bethlehem casino.

Just around the corner on the Bethlehem events calendar, the city’s Musikfest is held at the SteelStacks and just across the Hill to Hill Bridge among other places, and draws major artists and big crowds for its free concerts (August 1-10).

At dusk, the SteelStacks glow along the elevated Hoover-Mason Trestle that is open to the public.

Credit: Alexandra Palmieri

Guests come to The Sayre Mansion for everything from playing at the area’s historic golf clubs to touring Lehigh as part of taking their teens on a college tour. A large white tent outside for weddings attests to the inn’s local popularity—as d0 events like a recent speakeasy and flapper themed evening in the cellar.

Out front of The Sayre Mansion, an enormous ginkgo tree that Robert Sayre planted still thrives and delights. And every time you go through the inn’s heavy wooden and glass front door, still-intact with original brass fittings and an outer pocket door, you’ll appreciate the fortuitous revival success story of an urban icon.

Owners of The Sayre Mansion since the early-2000s, the Settlers Hospitality group concentrates on a handful of properties with historically significant roots in the northeastern Pennsylvania Pocono and the lower New York Catskill mountains.