The WPA Guide to New York City

The WPA Guide to New York City is a time-machine and teleportation device disguised as a book. Compiled and published in the 1930s as part of the New Deal effort to keep writers and artists employed, it captures the bones of the city as it was then, a skeleton still visible in many places, through capsule histories of neighborhoods, buildings, and services. (It is also how I discovered the amazing House-Number Key to Manhattan.)