20 Jan 2026

New York, Forever Lost and Found

by Anna Merlan

New York City Guide; a comprehensive guide to the five boroughs of the metropolis: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond.

When I first moved to New York in 2009, the very first night I lay down to sleep in a coffin-narrow room in Harlem, I had a maddening sense of wonderful things happening just out of my reach: all the parties I didn’t know about yet, the restaurants I hadn’t found, the bookstores, all the friends and enemies and secret places I knew were waiting for me. I found them—some of them, anyway; but New York’s appeal always remained, in part, the sense of how many alternate realities might still be at hand, if I only went up the right staircase, walked down the right street at the right time, or had the right chance encounter.

I’ve been away for years, and am now an outsider again who comes to town occasionally and marvels at what’s there now, what’s gone, my vanished youth, and how many places have become a Capital One Café. But that sense of another, more mysterious, tantalizing New York existing nearby on a different plane is still with me. I glimpsed it again recently when, in an English-language bookstore in Tokyo, I picked up a very old copy of the The New York City Guide, published in 1939 by the Federal Writers Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration. A New Deal-era program, the FWP hired out-of-work writers to produce guides to the 48 existing American states and Alaska. The project was part of an even larger entity, Federal Project One, which created jobs for out-of-work artists, including musicians, actors and artists.

For years, the identities of the FWP writers weren’t widely known; then as now, writers tended to keep their money troubles to themselves. But researchers eventually learned that the ranks of the FWP included many famous names, among them Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, and Studs Terkel. An absorbing report in the New York Times relates that some participants found the work to be humbling, if not outright humiliating; John Cheever, for instance, was an editorial assistant in the FWP, a task he apparently hated and predictably found to be beneath him, reportedly describing his job as fixing “the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards.”