Down in the bones of old New York, in the historic waterfront district of Lower Manhattan, Joana Avillez clutched her tattered copy of “The Bottom of the Harbor,” a 1959 book by Joseph Mitchell filled with tales of the neighborhood’s fishmongers, bearded sailors and giant rats.

Avillez, a 39-year-old illustrator who grew up here along the brackish East River, sipped an iced coffee as she roamed the cobblestone streets, telling me about this vanished world.

In place of the joggers on the promenade and tourists in the plaza, fishmongers once barked out prices for halibut from the pungent stalls of the Fulton Fish Market. Steps away from a McNally Jackson bookstore, there was Sloppy Louie’s, a seafood restaurant where Mitchell had kippered herring with scrambled eggs for breakfast.

Avillez was retracing Mitchell’s footsteps, but also her own. She spent the past six years illustrating a new Modern Library edition of “The Bottom of the Harbor,” a collection of stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, where Mitchell was a fabled staff writer. “Sometimes I feel like I’m chasing Mitchell’s ghost, or that he’s following me,” she said. “I’m always seeing him down here.”

Walking down Water Street toward Peck Slip, she watched some teenagers skateboarding on the square.

“When I was a girl, this was part of the Fulton Fish Market, and there were still burning trash cans,” she said. “I saw the last breaths of the world Mitchell wrote about. I still remember the early morning shouts of the fishmongers. My father used to buy clams at the market to bring home. I stepped over crabs to get to the school bus, and the kids would say, ‘Pee-yoo!’”