The uptown Museum Row no one knows about

It was a visionary idea around 1900: the construction of a majestic cultural complex in the wide-open, breezy space between Riverside Drive and Broadway at 155th Street.

At the time, this area of Upper Manhattan, once part of the estate of artist James Audubon in the 1840s, was being developed into a residential neighborhood.

Builders were putting up apartment houses and flats in what they hoped would be a prime part of the city. Adding a beautiful museum row would enhance the area and give it cultural cache.

So the Beaux Arts-style, granite and limestone structures were built, centered around a brick walkway and sunken courtyard and marked by a wrought-iron gate. Opened in 1904, this uptown museum row was called Audubon Terrace.

The Hispanic Society of America, a museum with Goyas and El Grecos, moved in. So did the American Indian Museum, American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Geographical Society, and the American Numismatic Society.

This cultural crossroads attracted crowds, at least at first. The problem? As they say, location location location.

Upper Manhattan didn’t pan out as the well-to-do enclave developers had hoped. And it was far out of the loop of the main part of the city.

Decades passed. Three of the original tenants moved out. Only the Hispanic Society museum and the American Academy of Arts and Letters remain. Boricua College, a bilingual institution, has joined them.

Audubon Terrace today feels like a secret. The wide courtyard, ghostly equestrian statue of El Cid, and other monuments to art and culture are devoid of crowds.

The art at the Hispanic Society is fantastic (and free!). It’s an ideal place for walking and looking and dreaming.

[Photos: Second photo, 1919, MCNY; third, 1925 postcard from MCNY]

When Audubon settled in Upper Manhattan

After Birds of America earned him success and money, ornithologist and painter John James Audubon bought an estate for himself and his family in 1842 roughly around today’s West 150s.

Nine miles north of the city center, he called it Minniesland, after his wife.

“Audubon’s original purchase was a fourteen-acre right triangle that began on the flat land at the crest of the Heights just north of Carmansville and slightly west of the Kingsbridge Road, at a point in the center of the intersection of present-day Amsterdam Avenue and 155th Street,” states the Audubon Park Historic District website.

It sounds like paradise, which makes it all the more unfortunate that after Audubon’s death in 1851, his widow was forced to sell the land.

In the 1850s, Minniesland (above, in 1864, from the Audubon Park Historic District website), was carved up into Audubon Park, a neighborhood of villas. At the turn of the century, row houses and apartment buildings came in. The Audubon house disappeared by the 1930s.

Today, the neighborhood “bears no resemblance to the wooded vale that John James Audubon bought in 1841 and deeded to his wife, Lucy,” reports the Audubon Park Historic District website.

“The ancient elms and oaks that towered above dogwood and tulip trees on the hillside and the tall pines nearer the water, the streams that flowed through ponds and over a waterfall before joining the river, the enclosures where deer and elk mingled with domestic animals are long gone, displaced in stages of development and progress that culminated in the cityscape that exists today.”

Upper Manhattan hasn’t forgotten its famous resident (at left). Audubon Avenue and Audubon Terrace memorialize him, and Audubon himself is buried in Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street.