American Academy of Arts and Letters

It shares Audubon Terrace, a Beaux Arts/American Renaissance complex on Broadway between West 155th and 156th Streets, with the Hispanic Society of America and Boricua College.

[8] Active sponsors of Congressional action were Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and former President Theodore Roosevelt.

[14] The academy occupies three buildings on the west end of the Audubon Terrace complex created by Archer M. Huntington, the heir to the Southern Pacific Railroad fortune and a noted philanthropist.

[15] On the north side, another building housing an auditorium and gallery was designed by Cass Gilbert, also an academy member, and built in 1928–1930.

[15][16] These additions to the complex necessitated considerable alterations to the Audubon Terrace plaza, which were designed by McKim, Mead & White.

[16] In 2009, the space between the Annex and the administration building was turned into a new entrance link, designed by Vincent Czajka with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

Greatness and pettiness are demonstrable among the academy members, even during the first decade, when William James declined his nomination on the grounds that his little brother Henry had been elected first.

[18] One of the giants of the academy in his time, Robert Underwood Johnson, casts a decades-long shadow in his one-man war against encroaching modernism, blackballing such writers as H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot (before his emigration to England disqualified him for full membership).

[19] Former Harvard president Charles William Eliot declined election to the academy "because he was already in so many societies that he didn't want to add to the number".

[21] The admission of Julia Ward Howe in January 1908 (at age 88) as the first woman in the academy was only one incident in the intense debate about the consideration of female members.

[22] In 1926, the election of four women—Edith Wharton, Margaret Deland, Agnes Repplier and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman—was said to have "marked the letting down of the bars to women".