A block south of Columbus Circle, on the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, a steel-and-glass office tower with faceted sides is rising 42 stories up from the six-story limestone facade of the Hearst Building. The steel and glass rises from the black netting draped over the landmarked building like a vigorous young shoot rooted in a corpse, an example of how New York can renew itself while holding onto its past. New York is haunted by the ghosts of long gone buildings, the sorely mourned Penn Station being the chief specter. “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” an exhibition of photographs by Danny Lyon at the Museum of the City of New York, documents the razing of 60 acres at the southern tip of the island almost 40 years ago, and the pictures bring back to life what was there and what was lost.

Mr. Lyon was still in his 20s at the time, but had already finished a stint in the South as staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and two years of riding with the Chicago Outlaws, a motorcycle gang. Exhausted and unsure what he wanted to do next, he returned to his native New York and rented a cheap loft in a building at the corners of Beekman and William Streets in downtown Manhattan. His windows faced south, and from them he noticed that a huge swath of city was disappearing: buildings, blocks, whole neighborhoods were being demolished. He resolved to document this enormous project, to create a record of as many buildings as he could before they slid into history. This area had once been the commercial center of the city, familiar to Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. What was to be built in its place would be nothing like it.

“80 and 82 Beekman Street” captures the sense of transition very well. A lone young man walks toward us on the sidewalk at the lower right-hand corner of the picture and twists his body to look into a now-vacant lot to his right. Adjacent to the lot is a solid brick wall many stories high and seemingly permanent, but across the street two buildings with quite ornate facades have already been vacated and heavy, timbered scaffolding erected to catch the debris that will fall when they come down. These are buildings that, if they were in SoHo today, would be being renovated in anticipation of some upscale use. The young man’s gesture in turning toward the vacant lot as he strides along makes us see its emptiness with his eyes and, like him, we wonder what was there.

In many of the pictures, there are no people or automobiles, a circumstance that makes any picture of New York City streets uncanny. The bottom half of “West Street between Jay and Duane Streets” shows puddles on a cobblestoned street on an overcast day. The street has irregular patches of macadam and an iron manhole cover; the water reflects parts of desolate five story commercial buildings. The paint that once announced the businesses that occupied these buildings has faded to illegibility, the ground-level doorways and windows are boarded up, and two police barricades on wooden horses assert the authority of the government that ordered the evacuation of the area. A pall hangs over the deserted intersection, as if it had been a plague that depopulated it.

Mr. Lyon’s style draws on the view camera techniques of Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, and through them on the systematic documentation of fin de siecle Paris by Eugene Atget. Atget spent many years when he was a young man touring as an actor in a provincial theater company, and I think he looked at every cityscape as a potential stage set, every architectural detail as a prop. At any rate, there is in Atget’s pictures a sense of something about to happen that Mr. Lyon frequently captures and translates into the past tense – that is, a sense of something having happened, not only of lives gone, but of ways of life. There is a great poignancy to these pictures, a nostalgia for something we never had to begin with. It takes a young man to be so sensitive to that.

Many of the best photographs are pictures of empty interiors. Mr. Lyon wandered through the vacant buildings like a spelunker exploring above ground, shooting rooms and details. “Wall in the St. George Building” shows a charming frieze of daisy garlands in stamped tin set above a wall of wood slats with a run of exposed electrical conduit on it. “Room in Washington Market” shows stamped tin molding of a Greekish design above a wall with a calendar turned to November 1951,and the picture of a cheery, wholesome, 1950s pinup on her knees. “Marilyn, in an Abandoned Building” is the classic nude hanging on a nail set in a deteriorating wood panel, sad for many reasons. “Self-Portrait in an Abandoned West Street Hotel Room” is as romantic as its title: A young, bearded man stares soulfully at the camera,a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, dust and debris covering bottles and an electric hot plate on a empty dresser, an unmade bed in a mirror. This is a room that has seen much coming and going and is itself about to disappear. Mr. Lyon befriended many of the wreckers, and there are also sympathetic portraits that evidence his respect for their skills.

“The Destruction of Lower Manhattan” is set in a space painted an appropriate brick red. It would be interesting to have this paper’s news reporters visit it to comment on the politicking that must have gone into so large an urban renewal project, and its architectural critic write on the significance of the buildings torn down and the worth of those that took their place, and its editorialists sum up the lessons to be learned. What we got was a new ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, an expansion of Pace University, and the World Trade Center, whose Twin Towers would meet their own fiery destruction on September 11, 2001. But without the effort of one restless young man there would be no comprehensive record of where we were 40 years ago, when the wrecking ball first swung.

Until September 8 (1220 Fifth Avenue, 212-534-1672).