International studio (34.1908)

Hispanic Society of America


Anew museum of treasures
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF
AMERICA
L BY C. LEWIS HIND
On a fine afternoon last winter I
braved the traffic in Times Square, New York,
and entered a Subway train. At One Hundred
and Fifty-seventh Street I alighted, having been
informed that in the environment of that number
begins such country as Manhattan offers; that there
the Hudson may be seen far below, surging round
the bend, preparing to exchange the silences of the
Catskills for the sophistication of the Palisades.
My information was tolerably reliable. If One
Hundred and Fifty-seventh Street is not as rural
as the interior of Staten
Island, the country does
strive to make a beginning.
Broadway has become a
wide road, unvexed bv
traffic; houses, actually de-
tached, nestle among actual
trees; uplands rise, and sk v
and distance are not ob-
scured by dwellings. The
river invited me, but be-
fore descending I paused,
paused again, and forth-
with determined to post-
pone my expedition round
the bend of the Hudson
toward the silences.
Why? Because I can
never resist the attraction
of a new building, particu-
larly such a building as that
which met my eyes, unpre-
tentious yet commanding,
classical in form and pro-
portion, standing isolated
on a hill, approached by
wide steps, rising from a
tiled terrace where one may
survey the surviving trees
of the pleasant wooded dis-
trict of Audubon, and look
over the Hudson and across
to the Palisades. To the
left of this building stands
another, smaller, but made
in the same image, looking
like a promising offspring.
Blazoned on the facade of Courtesy o! Hispanic Society oj America
the parent edifice, above the the turkey market

mullioned windows on the second floor, are these
great names : Columbus, Cervantes, Lope de Vega,
Camoens, Loyola, Velasquez. So this was the new
museum of the Hispanic Society of America, about
which I had heard and read, and a glance at the
smaller building to the left showed that it is the new
home of the American Numismatic Society. If you
pass through the inner bronze doors of the Hispanic
Society Museum, you will see a mahogany slab
resting upon a terra cotta basis. Inlaid in the
mahogany is a silver plate bearing the inscription •
“ This building is dedicated to the Memory of Collis
Potter Huntington.”
Since architecture began countless monuments
of divers kinds have been raised to the memory of

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