A few years ago, the Frick Collection hosted a special exhibition that brought together all the Velazquez paintings in New York. The paintings from the Frick and the Metropolitan were familiar to most visitors to the show, but the paintings from the Hispanic Society were unfamiliar, even though they came from a 100-year-old Manhattan museum that is open free of charge to the public.

For art-loving New Yorkers, the Hispanic Society on Broadway and 155th Street might as well be in another city. That’s a shame. Its world-class collection includes, in addition to scores of decorative objects and rare books, important paintings by El Greco (a Pieta), Velazquez (the Duke of Olivares), and Goya (the Duchess of Alba).

But the museum recently announced its plans to relocate to an undetermined downtown location, meaning that four of the museums that once inhabited the Audubon Terrace complex – the American Geographical Society, the Museum of the American Indian, and the American Numismatic Society are the others – have all de camped, or will soon decamp from the Acropolis on Washington Heights. Another institution, the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, remains.

Audubon Terrace is so called because it stands on land that was once part of John James Audubon’s estate. Audubon is buried in the nearby Trinity Cemetery, which, to my knowledge, has no plans to move. The complex was conceived by the railroad heir Archer Huntington, originally Archer Worsham, the son of Arabella Worsham, who married first Collis P. Huntington and then his nephew Henry E. Huntington. Archer once resided with his wife, the sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt, in the house at 1083 Fifth Avenue that is now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts.

An intense Hispanophile, Huntington bought the land for the complex in 1904 and founded the Hispanic Society as the raison d’etre of the museum complex. It was a little off the beaten path, but Huntington thought Washington Heights would soon become Manhattan’s next elegant neighborhood. Archer’s cousin, Charles Pratt Huntington, designed most of the complex. The six buildings, which also include the Our Lady of Esperanza church, are grouped in great colonnades around a central court. The whole thing seems to float above its surrounding neighborhood, which grew quite poor as the 20th century went on.

A charm of great cities is the out-of-the-way museum. Alas, how can one survive if people won’t go? That said, the neighborhood may yet seem not so off-the-beaten-path, and I hope the Hispanic Society doesn’t make the mistake Luchow’s restaurant made when it moved from 14th Street, thinking it a poor neighborhood for restaurants.