Out on bail, Bob Coffin meets Nancy, a shy and pretty girl, on a warm summer night at a Bronx dance hall in 1963. Their chance meeting sets off an intimate drama of desperation, petty crimes and betrayals in the streets and tenements of New York City. Captured in muted colors with poignant lyricism, The Lost of New York is the work of John "Butch" Rigney, Jr., an unpublished writer who died in 1967.

Abandoned for decades before being discovered in the attic at the childhood home of author Jim Provenzano (Rigney's nephew), the hand-typed manuscript has been meticulously scanned and edited. Based on Rigney's own life that included reform school, jail time and drug addiction, the varied stories weave a somber tapestry of urban despair with a glimmer of hope.