Ansel Adams describes in “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs” his experience shooting “White House Ruin,” the remains of an Anasazi Indian pueblo village in the niche of a cliff in New Mexico:

One bright morning on a trip for this project, I was photographing in the Canyon de Chelly and came across a strangely familiar scene. I moved my 5 x 7 Zeiss Juwel camera to what seemed the most effective viewpoint and made two photographs of the old ruins nestled in the high streaked cliff on the north side of the canyon. … Only when I had completed the print months later did I realize why the subject had a familiar aspect: I had seen the remarkable photograph made by Timothy O’Sullivan in 1873, in the album of his prints that I once possessed. I had stood unaware in almost the same spot on the canyon floor, about the same month and day, and at nearly the same time of day that O’Sullivan must have made his exposure, almost exactly sixty-nine years earlier.

But what if instead of the same moldering ruins, the niche had been occupied by a condominium retirement community, or a regional shopping center, or a Native American theme park?

Douglas Levere has systematically reshot more than 100 of the photographs Berenice Abbott took in the 1930s for her classic book “Changing New York,” and he has had both experiences: Sometimes what the camera sees is remarkably the same as what it saw 60 years ago; sometimes it is considerably different. Fifty-one examples of his project are on display at the Museum of the City of New York in “New York Changing.” The original Abbott prints are hung side by side with Mr. Levere’s, providing a sort of temporal stereoscopic view of the city in which the only thing constant about the past and the present is change.

In 1997 Mr. Levere was at an auction and came across Abbott’s vintage contact print “Broadway Near Broome Street” (1935). He lived on Broome Street and studied the print carefully, noting that the stores in the retail spaces had all changed, that at least one building in the old print was no longer there, that the elegant bishop’s crook lampposts had been replaced with utilitarian cobra heads, and that the two-way vehicular traffic now all went one way. SoHo is one of the sections of the city that has been preserved, first by neglect and currently by ordinance, so it was still recognizable as very much the same Broadway. But what would it look like 60 years in the future? Mr. Levere wanted to create a record, as Abbott had, so there would be something then with which to make comparisons.

Mr. Levere’s “Commerce Street, Nos. 39-41” (2001) is little different from Abbott’s “Commerce Street, Nos. 39-41” (1937). The two identical three story buildings, brick with slate roofs and dormered windows, are pretty much the same, although some tin chimneys have been removed from the farther house. The middle window on the second floor of the building in the foreground sports an air conditioner that would not have existed in 1937. The railing around some belowground windows has been changed. But the biggest difference between the two pictures is that the street and sidewalk in the older one are empty while the more recent has a lamppost at the corner with one-way signs pointing in opposing directions, a stop sign against which someone has left a bicycle, and a car parked at the curb. Also, a manhole cover seems to have gone missing.

Greenwich Village is a neighborhood whose foremost purpose is to be quaint, where the most compelling political instinct is to thwart change. There are, however, radical differences between “Custom House Statues and New York Produce Exchange, Bowling Green” (1936) and “Statues in Front of the Former Custom House and MTA Headquarters” (1997). In the foreground of each are the same allegorical statues representing the continents, but in the background of the former is the distinguished palazzo built in 1907, in which the scale of the arched windows changes as the building rises. That structure was gone by the time Mr. Levere got there, replaced in 1959 by a blandly Modernist postwar building whose glass and metal curtain wall does not vary as it heads up and out of the picture. The statues that seemed compatible with the old building are incongruous juxtaposed with the new. The loss of grace represented by the two pictures explains the pressures that led to the formation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up” (1936) and “Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up” (2001), show the same steel pier from the same dramatic angle, although a traffic sign is now attached. Mr. Levere obtained one of Abbott’s cameras to shoot with and used identical lenses whenever he could, and in every way possible tried to replicate her work – waiting until the right day of the year and the right time of day and the right weather, finding the exact spot – but here, as in several other instances, Abbott’s work is superior, sharper, has more snap – so that, for instance, the pattern of the rivets is clearer.

Still, Douglas Levere has done the people of New York a major service, bringing his great predecessor’s work forward, and providing sight lines to the future. He lets us see in the difference between “Oyster Houses, South Street and Pike Slip” (1937) and “South Street and Pike Street” (2002), that the salty oyster houses are gone, replaced by a simple railing and a lone jogger. The contrasting sets of pictures of Jefferson Market Court, Herald Square, and especially Abbott’s ” ‘El,’ Second and Third Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street” (1936) and his “Bowery and Division Street”(2002) remind us of what an improvement it was when the elevated subway lines in Manhattan came down.

This exhibition makes a worthy counterpart to “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan,” Danny Lyon’s photographs in a nearby gallery. Change is about nostalgia and anticipation, knowing what must stay and what can go, about arbitrating between the titanic economic forces that are the players in shaping Gotham. At a time when virtually every neighborhood in the city is seeing new buildings, the Museum of the City of New York provides a necessary tutorial.

Until November 27 (1220 Fifth Avenue, between 104th and 105th Streets, 212-534-1672).