Prospect Park Boathouse

By the 1960s, fewer than ten people an hour visited the Boathouse, even on the busiest summer weekends. In September 1964, Brooklyn poet Marianne Moore rallied preservationists and managed to halt demolition just 48 hours before the wrecking ball arrived. The building became one of New York City’s first landmarks in 1965, designated even before the park itself. Today it faces west over the Lullwater, positioned exactly where its architects intended: to catch every sunset.

The demolition order had come from the Parks Department itself, tired of maintaining a building almost nobody used. Moore’s intervention worked, but only just, buying the Boathouse a few more decades of quiet decline before real restoration money arrived in the 1970s. What survives now is essentially the original argument made physical: that a building can earn its keep by being beautiful at the right time of day, even when nobody’s renting a boat. The sunsets, at least, never stopped showing up.