Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89

New York|Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89

Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, “Lost New York,” offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89.

His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.

Mr. Silver’s book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University’s architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city’s long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed.

“By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,” he wrote. “It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera” — it was destroyed in 1967 — “and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.”

He added, “While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.”

He found images in archives of “first-rate architecture” that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; the art collector Richard Canfield’s gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.