Among the books left me by my great-aunt Catherine Hart was “The Complete Street Guide to New York,” produced under the direction of Alexander Gross, FRGS. Incidentally, Mr. Gross’s somewhat pretentious post-nominal initials signify that he was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society: “That is,” as H. R. Trevor-Roper wrote of the reclusive Sir Edmund Backhouse, Bt., FRGS, sinologist and forger, he was “one of 6,000 subscribers to its Journal.”

Mr. Gross probably considered his pamphlet no more than tourist ephemera. But its survival in my great-aunt’s attic has transformed it to a directory of a New York that has nearly vanished.

From its first page, the “Guide” speaks of change: “The Third Avenue L line in Manhattan has been recently discontinued, therefore all stations of same Line in Manhattan should be disregarded in this Guide.” Third Avenue’s unusual width is a result of its one-time accommodation of the great iron bridges that bore elevated trains between the Battery – via Coenties Slip, Pearl Street, the Bowery, and Third Avenue – and the Bronx. What Brendan Gill called the railroad’s “Piranesi crosshatch of heavy black steel uprights and sooty crossties” cast a permanent shadow over the avenue. Artists, such as John Sloan and the lesser lights of the Ashcan school found the El and its trains enduring subjects for their paintings and etchings, as were the low-rent businesses – offbeat restaurants, Irish bars, barber colleges, thrift shops, tattooists, and flophouses – that flourished in its shade because the El’s soot, rattle, and noise depressed property values.

No one expected change: The El had nearly 900 years left on its franchise when its Manhattan lines were abandoned and demolished during six months in 1955. When the avenue emerged from its “perpetual shadow,” the developers began replacing its shabby brownstones with the sterile office towers that crowd it now.

Parenthetically, a fragment of the El survived into the 1970s as a Bronx feeder to the IRT, shuttling between Gun Hill Road and 149th Street: Thirty years ago, the El still bestrode Fordham Road like a colossus when I saw it for the first and last time.

The “Guide” is also a window into everyday conventions in the days when Eisenhower was president, Harriman governor, and Wagner mayor. For example, all houses of worship are classified as churches. Between the Greek Orthodox and Lutheran listings is the heading “Hebrew,” a usage that might have seemed slightly offensive even then. The “Foreign and Special Districts” apparently classifies Chinatown, Greenwich Village, Harlem (described as “Negro”), Little Italy, and Yorkville (German) as extraterritorial enclaves. Under City Offices, Tax Collection had not yet been sanitized into Finance, Welfare into Human Resources, and the Morgue into the Medical Examiner.

The map itself most powerfully evidences change by showing transportation’s radical transformation. At what is now Ground Zero stood the Hudson Terminal Building, once the world’s largest office complex, the end of the line for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (now the PATH train), towering over the printing plants, warehouses, factories, bars, and ferry slips at its foot. The tall-stacked railroad ferries, for the Pennsylvania, the Lackawanna, and the Erie, still carried commuters from huge bronze-green stations in Hoboken, Weehawken, and Jersey City to Manhattan slips at Barclay, Chambers, Christopher, Cortlandt, and 42nd streets. Within a decade of the “Guide’s” publication, they were gone.

The West Side, from the fruit docks off Washington Market to “Liner Row,” Piers 84-97, where Cunard White Star and French Line ships often departed on the same morning tide, to 59th Street was lined with piers and wharves “like teeth in a comb,” to quote the “AIA Guide to New York City.” Traveling abroad still meant travelling by sea. As Jan Morris wrote, “There was almost as much traffic in the harbor as there was on the streets, and billowing black clouds of steamship smoke habitually drifted over the waters. Wherever, you looked out there, sea shapes were moving.” New York’s peak year of passenger travel by liner was 1957: Morris wrote that its top day was September 3, 1957, when 12 liners disembarked 9,000 passengers. Yet that was also the first year in which as many left New York by air as by sea.

Change came nearly overnight. The passengers went to the airliners. The cargoes went to container ships, for intermodal shipping containers can pass from ship to truck or flatcar without breaking bulk. Longshoremen, the ships they unloaded, and the docks they worked became obsolete within two decades. The city government was unable to grasp this change. New Jersey did. Thus ships that might be docking in Brooklyn moor in Newark and Elizabethport.

In 1984, The New York Times discontinued its daily listing of shipping arrivals and departures. It no longer seemed important.