Audubon Terrace Historic District

Audubon Terrace is a cluster of eight cultural and scholarly buildings gathered around a terraced courtyard in Washington Heights, Manhattan, on land once part of John James Audubon's estate. Philanthropist Archer M. Huntington began assembling the site in 1904, starting with the Hispanic Society of America, and his cousin Charles P. Huntington designed most of the buildings in a unified neo-Italian Renaissance style. Institutions housed here include the American Numismatic Society, the American Geographical Society, the Museum of the American Indian, the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, whose two buildings were designed by William Mitchell Kendall of McKim, Mead & White and by Cass Gilbert. Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington and others adds to the Beaux-Arts composition. The complex was recognized because gathering research institutions outside a university setting was unusual in America, because it offered scholarly facilities free to the public, and because its design remains unified and its collections are nationally important.