The Hispanic Society of America ca. 1919 Founded in 1904 by Archer Huntington, the son of a wealthy railroad tycoon, the Hispanic Society of America stands as a testament to Washington Heights' opulent past at the turn of the twentieth century. Huntington developed Audubon Terrace, the block between 155th and 156th Streets west of Broadway, on land that was originally part of the farm of painter and naturalist John James Audubon. Huntington invited other cultural institutions to locate there, and today Audubon Terrace also houses the American Numismatic Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Boricua College. The Hispanic Society building is a sprawling, Beaux Arts style structure that contains one of the largest collections of Spanish art in the United States, including works by El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. The sculptures on the plaza in front of the building were created by Huntington’s wife, the prominent sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Huntington created the society as an elite academic institution with limited access. In recent years the Society has loosened its stringent regulations and has reached out to both scholars and members of the Washington Heights community, in an attempt to increase its visibility.

In the closing decades of the 19th century, New York underwent a profound physical and cultural transformation. Fueled by the wealth of the exploding financial and manufacturing sectors, the city rapidly evolved into a world-class metropolis. The bold ambitions of civic and business leaders, architects, and engineers of the era manifested in landmarks such as the vast Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the stately U.S. Custom House, the towering Municipal Building, and the original terminus of New York City’s first official subway line—the ornate City Hall stop. The sweeping interior spaces common to all of these structures, and hundreds of others, depended upon a venerable Mediterranean building technology adapted to contemporary American construction: arched tile ceilings—or vaults—that were not only self-supporting but could also bear the weight of floors or roofs above them. These vaults were designed and built by a single New York firm, founded by Spanish immigrant Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) and later headed by his son Rafael Jr. (1872-1950). The Guastavinos’ patented system for building domes and vaults involved multiple layers of thin ceramic tiles bonded with quick-drying mortar. The resulting structures were not only exceptionally strong, but also lightweight, easy to build, and inherently beautiful, thanks to intricate patterns of exposed tile that formed finished, decorative surfaces. Guastavino vaults figured prominently in more than 1,000 projects across the nation, including 200 in Manhattan alone. During its 73-year history, the Guastavino Company helped build some of the most impressive interior spaces in America—veritable palaces for the people. This list based on MCNY's exhibition Palaces for the People, contains many of Guastavino's masterpieces in the five boroughs, both those that remain and those that have been lost to the wrecking ball.

By Margaret A. Brucia On March 10, 1921, Julia Gardiner Gayley, wrestling with seating plans for her upcoming parties, wrote to her daughter Mary from Washington Square. "I have two big lunch parties with which I am now struggling. Perhaps you would like to know who is coming. Friday I have both men and women as follows: Besides G\[ano] and myself there will be Mr. and Mrs. Billy Delano— both charming—Mr. and Mrs. Walter Maynard, Mr. and Mrs. Murray Young, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Rosen, an English painter, Mr. McEvoy coming with Rosens (she was one of the Bigelows), Mrs. Lucy Hewitt, Lucy \[Frelinghuysen], Edith Morgan, Frances Rumsey, Louise Sands, Paul Dana, Larry White, Archer Huntington, the man who gave all the Spanish museum, church, etc., to New York and whose wife ran away last year with the play writer Granville Barker. So everybody is trying to give him a nice time. I may add Frances Blodgett and Lord Carrington who she has in her train. Horne is attending to the luncheon for me with two extra men." And that was only the first of her two parties. Julie’s guests were a diverse group of architects, musicians, painters, authors and philanthropists; Protestants, Catholics and one Jew. The litany of names attests as much to the broad scope and range of Julie’s friends as to her ability to create a lively and interesting mix of people. Although each invitee had a notable backstory, Julie singled out just one for comment: the victim of a recent social scandal, around whom his friends loyally closed ranks. Who was Archer Huntington? What did “all the Spanish museum, church, etc.” mean? Why did his wife jilt him? And how was he handling the aftermath? Read this in its original format here.

Located on a portion of John James Audubon’s former estate, Audubon Terrace is one of the country’s first planned cultural centers outside a university context. Archer M. Huntington, stepson of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, was fascinated by Hispanic culture, and founded the Hispanic Society of America in 1904. To design its headquarters, Huntington hired his cousin, Charles Huntington. Hoping that geographic closeness would encourage cooperation, Archer Huntington donated land to encourage the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza, the American Numismatic Society, the American Geographic Society and the Museum of the American Indian to locate here. Although the center’s construction spanned two decades and four architectural firms, the structures were all designed in the neo-Italian Renaissance style to create a unified setting. In keeping with the Beaux-Arts tradition, the buildings were all arranged around a central courtyard paved in red brick, enclosed by stone balustrades and filled with sculptures designed by Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer’s wife, and others. Audubon Terrace has sustained some change, with additions and newer buildings necessitating the reorientation of the entrance from West 156th Street to Broadway. Today, the complex is occupied by the Hispanic Society of America, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a campus of Boricua College.

Our Lady of Esperanza Church, 1924. Designed by Charles P. Huntington, the original structure was completed in 1912 with a staircase entrance to 156th Street. In 1924, a new facade by Lawrence G. White — son of Stanford White — extended the facade to street level and moved the entrance staircase to the building’s interior.

Hispanic Society of America, 1922. The Hispanic Society of America was founded by philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington in 1904. The building is both a museum and reference library for the arts and culture of primarily Spain and Portugal, as well as some of the former colonies in Latin America, the Philippines, and Portuguese India. Huntington, possessed with a passion for scholarship, amassed a great portion of the museum's collection of over 18,000 works using his family's resources. In addition to funding the curation of artifacts, Huntington's family also participated in the design of the museum. Archer Milton Huntington's cousin, Charles P. Huntington, designed three buildings of the Audobon Terrace complex. The philanthropist's wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, is credited for many of the statues around the terrace, including the equestrian statue "El Cid" that serves as the unofficial mascot of the museum. The museum's collection features paintings from renowned artists such as Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Zurbaran, and Ribera. Among other objects, Huntington's holdings also include a variety of ceramics, 15th-century door knockers, a cartography collection, and an extensive library of literary works relevant to Hispanic culture, all published prior to the 19th century, including a copy of the first issue of popular Spanish novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Huntington's interest in specifically Spanish culture was prompted by English author George Borrow's "The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies in Spain," published in 1841. Enamored by Borrow's account on life in Spain, Huntington began taking Spanish language lessons and studying the country's culture from afar. A young Archer Huntington's interests in art and culture were not unusual for his family. His father Collis Potter Huntington was one of the Big Four of the Western Railroad. His financial holdings allowed Archer's mother, Arabella, to amass her own collection of Dutch Old Master paintings, 18th century English portraiture, 18th-century French decorative arts. At the age of 12, a young Archer wrote of his experience at a museum: "Read the catalog until I could not see anymore and went to bed. I think a museum is the grandest thing in the world. I should like to live in one." As a teenager, he began amassing the collection that would later form the foundation of his own museum. After Huntington accompanied his parents on a trip to Mexico, he came to the conclusion that he would devote his time and resources to opening a "Spanish Museum." He purchased the site to build his grand museum in 1904. Huntington was deliberate in both the acquisition of his collection and the display of his works. After frequent trips to Spain and Latin America, he claimed his earlier studies of the regions produced a sterile and academic understanding of Hispanic culture. His museum would display the soul of the culture, supposedly discovered by Huntington in his travels. The collections were almost exclusively acquired from collectors and dealers outside of Spain: Huntington was cautious not to dispossess Spain of its cultural heritage. The "Spanish Museum," now named, "The Hispanic Society," opened in 1908, for the "advancement of the study of the Spanish and Portuguese languages, literature, and history." In 1910, Huntington planned to expand the museum with a series of works three meters tall and seventy meters wide by the painter Joaquin Sorolla depicting daily life in contemporary Spain and Portugal. Regarding the arrangement of works in the museum and the lack of windows, Huntington said, "the windows of art museums should be pictures." The collection of archaeological artifacts on display are in part from Huntington's own excavation in a site French archaeologist Arthur Engel abandoned in Itálica. In 1920, Huntington took a pause on populating his collection and instead focused on the scholarly research that could take place in the museum. He sought to encourage young scholars to utilize the vast resources he gathered. He said of his staff, "I hope to get each one interested in a single subject, so that they may become expert." The Society's librarians, a group of young women who had recently graduated from library school, were asked to become chief curators of the museum's holdings. The women selected fields such as Paintings and Drawings, Sculpture, Ceramics, Font, and Textiles, which they researched and cataloged for up to 50 years. Huntington's museum prompted a great advancement in the discipline of Hispanic studies. Huntington's greatest desire, as described in a 1920 letter to his mother, was to "prepare the way for others."