In 1966, a swath of Lower Manhattan faced a demolition job of staggering magnitude. Over the next year, whole streets were slated to disappear, and did, along with the cast-iron "Bartleby the Scrivener"-era buildings that lined them, housing printing lofts and importers, tanneries and produce stalls. More than 24 city blocks would be razed to allow for a wave of development that included an access ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, the expansion of Pace University, and office buildings, shops and housing.

Opening the way for the expansion of West Street, the construction of the World Trade Center and, eventually, Battery Park City, the area was pulled apart, literally, brick by brick. In all, some 60 acres of buildings below Canal Street vanished.

As astonishing as the scope of the demolition project was, it attracted few witnesses. One was the photographer Danny Lyon.

Returning to New York that year after shooting "The Bikeriders," his series about a Chicago motorcycle gang, he moved into a loft on Williams Street, in the heart of the largely empty neighborhood, and was struck by the atmosphere of abandonment. He approached associates at the Magnum photo agency, who helped him arrange financing for his project to document the disappearance of the buildings and the 19th-century mercantile New York they evoked.

Titling his project "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan," he worked on the series for a year, capturing somber views of the facades and interiors of the doomed structures and the efforts of demolition workers to bring down their sturdy columns and frames. (Among those structures was one of the oldest cast-iron buildings in the world, a four-story industrial space constructed in 1848.) The result, a book with scores of stark black-and-white photographs, was published in 1969 by Macmillan.

Today, as the city ponders the eerie void left downtown by the destruction of the World Trade Center, the book has just been reissued by Powerhouse in tandem with an exhibition of vintage prints from Mr. Lyon's project at the Museum of the City of New York.

Setting out on his mission, Mr. Lyon says, he decided early on that his focus would be on the buildings. "There was no story in Lower Manhattan," he writes in the introduction to the new edition. "Not about people anyway. No one really lived there then." He did zero in on the few people there, like tough city youths exploring the ruins and the sweaty, hard-hatted men who made up the work crews. But in the end, he writes, "The story was destruction."

Images of architectural demise date from the origins of photography in the mid-19th century. Before long such work became virtually a genre unto itself, dedicated to capturing urban worlds teetering on the edge of oblivion.

From Atget's shots of old, warrenlike Paris giving way to Haussmann's broad boulevards, to newspaper images of the implosion of St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe housing project more than a century later, photographers famed and unknown have been drawn to doomed cityscapes. What is striking about Mr. Lyon's images, though, is their refusal to tug at the emotions, as so many other photos of obsolescent architecture have tended to do. Like hulking creatures prepared for sacrifice, the buildings announce themselves with a proud dignity and unsettling quietude.

In one image, the boarded dormers over three Washington Street fruit and produce warehouses look like peacefully closed eyelids rather than signals of their scheduled demise. (Ultimately, the buildings were spared, although vastly transformed.)

In one incongruous image, a group of five women in summer dresses search in vain for the Beekman Hospital amid the ruins of the St. George Building, an elephantine 1870 warehouse. And at Jay Street and West, an ancient merchants' building adorned with a first-floor awning casts a mournful late-afternoon shadow across the refuse-strewn lot next door.

The life that once teemed in the city's leather district and, across town, in the produce stalls of the old Washington Market is registered only by the occasional automobile.

"After 5 p.m. and on weekends, Lower Manhattan was a ghost town," Mr. Lyon, who lives in Ulster County in New York and Sandoval County in New Mexico, said by e-mail message. "There was absolutely no one anywhere."

In the years after completing "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan," Mr. Lyon, a Brooklyn native raised in Queens, continued to produce series of photographs, including "Conversations With the Dead," shot largely within the Texas prison system. When he began shooting the Lower Manhattan series, he was already becoming famous for two other bodies of work that seemingly had little in common with photographs of urban destruction or renewal. As staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had traveled to Mississippi to photograph the civil rights movement, capturing violent confrontations between protesters, police officers and angry Southerners. With "The Bikeriders," published in 1968, his unflinching you-are-there approach was even more pronounced. By the 1970's, Mr. Lyon would become what Nan Goldin called "a photo-school icon," choosing subjects that she said "helped define the milieus of choice for the male photographers of those times - prisons, biker gangs, political movements."

What unites those projects with "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan" is his interest in the socially and culturally marginal and powerless. This essentially journalistic sense of art engagé inflects even his most recent project, "Five Days," the DVD he shot last summer of protests in New York timed to the Republican National Convention. (It is to be screened on Aug. 10 at the Museum of the City of New York in conjunction with the exhibition.)

Both the destruction of 60 acres of buildings in 1966 and 67 and the demonstration during the convention were "'nonevents," Mr. Lyon said by e-mail message. "Nationally, the events that occurred in Manhattan for five days last August were simply omitted by the media."

"When the buildings were demolished in 1967, no one in New York cared," he said. "I don't recall ever seeing a single other photographer in front of a building during the six months it took to demolish them, though many hundreds of professional photographers then lived in Manhattan."

For all the grace of these condemned Civil War-era buildings, a measure of danger is ever present in the photographs. In the book, Mr. Lyon recounts scaling exposed fire escapes and traversing rotting floors to get his shots, and many demolition workers were less than welcoming to a long-haired artist. And political violence was in the air that summer, Mr. Lyon recalls; he writes of seeing, from the roof of his building, the smoke rising from the Newark riots.

More immediately, 9/11 has rewritten the context of the photographs. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, there was renewed interest in exhibiting his images, but Mr. Lyon initially resisted. "I thought it would be in bad taste to do it at the time, so I waited," he said. Then, the reissue of the book by Powerhouse prompted the Museum of the City of New York to seek an exhibition of the complete set of vintage prints, which were lent to the museum by a private collector.

Almost four decades later, "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan" retains its immediacy. "Photography is about reality," Mr. Lyon said. "Photography is reality. For six months of my young life, those doomed buildings and neighborhoods were my reality. Then I moved on."