Exhibition marks 50 years of preserving the Big Apple

Fifty years ago, the then New York Mayor Robert Wagner Jr signed the Landmarks Law to save important city buildings from demolition. An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York is surveying the legacy of the law, under which 1,347 individual landmarks have been deemed protected sites. The show, Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks (until 13 September), includes photographs, blueprints, videos and artefacts from destroyed and preserved buildings, such as fragments from the original Penn Station facade, which was demolished in 1963. Also on show are rarely seen drawings by the architect Marcel Breuer for a proposed office tower above Grand Central Terminal, a design which was struck down by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1968.