Hispanic art museum is a hidden NYC gem

Behind a wrought-iron gate on an attractive brick terrace in upper Manhattan sits the Hispanic Society of America, an imposing museum and research library.

It has a world-class collection of Iberian art, including works from such masters as Goya, Velazquez and El Greco, and monumental sculptures by Anna Hyatt Huntington, the wife of the society's founder.

Yet the 104-year-old institution in Washington Heights, just blocks from the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated, is not high on the itinerary of many tourists -- or even New Yorkers. Some don't even know it exists.

The society had briefly contemplated abandoning the area for more tourist-accessible locations downtown, like some of its former neighbors: the American Numismatic Society and the Museum of the American Indian. But it has resolved to stay.

It has a new advisory board and marketing strategy and a magnificent renovated gallery dedicated to 14 huge paintings by revered Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla, canvasses that founder Archer Huntington commissioned in 1911 specifically for the room.

Executive director Mitchell Codding said the institution's Sorolla collection is the largest outside Spain.

Staying put in a neighborhood that over time has gone from pastoral to gritty and is now a Latin-flavored urban mix has come at a cost of visitors, revenue and recognition. But the Hispanic Society of America is fighting to make itself and its treasures known to a wider audience, even selling Huntington's coin collection to raise money for new acquisitions.

Tourists from Spanish-speaking countries "make a beeline to come up there," said Michael Mowatt-Wynn, the society's community outreach advocate. But New Yorkers and other U.S. tourists are far less likely to be aware of it. School groups make up half of the Hispanic Society's attendance.

The museum, which is entered through an elaborately decorated courtyard featuring Moravian floor tiles, averages only 20,000 visitors a year, down from about 50,000 annually in the mid-1950s.

Deborah Miller of Wilton, Conn., who was visiting the museum on a recent Saturday, said she knew about it only because her daughter had worked there as an intern.

"The building is gorgeous," she said. "It is off the beaten track, but it's worth the visit."

The museum's neighborhood runs from 155th Street to above 190th Street and from the Hudson to the Harlem rivers. It was one of the last areas of Manhattan to be developed and was largely rural when the Hispanic Society opened in 1908 on land once owned by naturalist John James Audubon, across from Trinity Cemetery, the burial ground for New York's social elite.

Huntington lived in a mansion along Manhattan's Museum Mile but wanted his own institution away from the hubbub of Fifth Avenue.

The extension of the subway line to 157th Street in 1906 was one of the primary reasons Huntington chose to build the museum between 155th and 156th streets, said Codding. Huntington soon invited other institutions he was associated with onto his museum's street, Audubon Terrace. Now only the Academy of Arts and Letters remains. Boricua College occupies the former American Geographical Society building.

Mowatt-Wynn said the museum became mired in the changing demographics and economic downturn that struck New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s.

"But now the economic pendulum has swung the other way," and the area's predominantly Dominican and Mexican population is becoming more gentrified, he said.

"We're trying to make the community aware of the treasure we have," said Mowatt-Wynn, who is chief executive of the Harlem & the Heights Historical Society. "Until recently, it's been considered sort of as an ivory tower . . . a formidable institution that people felt was unapproachable."