From the City Room

Please Note: The N.Y. Today and Metropolitan Diary Columns Are Not Going Away

By The New York Times

Our announcement yesterday that City Room is retiring may have confused some readers.

Many of you seem to think that New York Today, the morning roundup column, is going away.

It is not. As it has since its inception, New York Today appears every weekday morning in Top Stories on the app, on the nytimes.com home page, and at nytoday.com. You can read this morning’s column here.

The only regular features that were still running on City Room, Metropolitan Diary and Big City Book Club, are not going away either. They are continuing on the main nytimes.com site.

Metropolitan Diary can be read here each weekday, with a week’s worth running in print, as usual, every Monday. And the next Big City Book Club is Nov. 10 — watch this space for details.

Thank you all for your kind words about City Room, and for joining us over the years.

From the City Room

City Room, a Blog With a Broad Mandate, Is Retiring

By Andy Newman
We shall spend the rest of our days lounging and cracking open mollusks. Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society

In the distant clamor of another decade, a group of wise men and women put their heads together and decided that what the New York Times website needed was a blog about New York City.

Focus groups were convened. Committees were formed. “We need a tone and mindset that are hip but NOT trendy,” one memo read.

The result was City Room. It debuted on June 14, 2007, “a news blog of live reporting, features and reader conversations about New York City.”

Now, eight years, 20,000 posts, 425,000 reader comments and perhaps 100 million clicks later, City Room has an announcement to make: Read more…

Metropolitan Diary

No Cheating at Zabar’s

By Heidi Olson

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

Zabar’s deli counter has its rules: Get your number by the roasting chickens and take your turn.

Last night there were no tickets. Fearing a pending crisis, I opened the number machine and refed the pink numbers into the tongue groove. That solved, I went back to the counter with No. 19 in hand.

There stood a tall man in an Army green jacket with a prominent mole on his cheek. He had arrived after me but before I fixed the machine. Then he turned and said, “Where are we with these numbers?” showing me No. 17.

Did he think I wouldn’t notice that he picked No. 17 off the counter after another customer had finished? Really! Every New Yorker knows there are some things you just don’t do.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

Discovering New York Together

By Adele P.

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

We met on the F train platform at Jay Street, both new arrivals to Brooklyn. (I asked him for directions, though I knew the way.)

On our first date, a couple of weeks later, a vendor at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket looked at us together and told him to “put a ring on it.” Somehow it became a joke between us that we were already married.

We discovered the city together: carrying my Craigslist find (a shoe rack) on our trip to the Bronx Zoo, devising a private rating system for every hot chocolate at every cafe, letting a Chinese tourist photograph us on a swing set after a jazz concert.

Now, four years later and 3,000 miles away, everything I miss most about New York is tied up in the autumn we spent together.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

After 82 Years, No More Driving

By Dawes Potter

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

I’m 93, a World War II Navy vet and all that stuff. Today I sold my final car. Tomorrow, as we prepare to move into our West Side co-op, I’ll turn in my New York vanity plates and get rid of my E-ZPass.

Strangely it’s been mostly a very happy day, flooded with great car memories. Like sitting in Pop’s lap at 7 and proudly steering our used Willys-Knight. Yes, I know. It’s now against the law, but it was so much fun I did the same for my own two and for my much younger stepsons. And if nobody was looking, I’d do it for my great-grandchildren.

Once, when I was 11, and Pop and I were, as usual, fiddling with our little cruiser down at the St. Paul Boat Club on the Mississippi, he discovered he’d forgotten something at home, a couple of miles away. He looked straight at me. “Have you driven by yourself?” “Yes I have!” I don’t know if he knew I was lying, but he tossed me the keys and off I drove, proud as a king.

In 1936 I turned 14, the legal driving age in Minnesota back then. I went to the local license bureau to apply. They gave me an application to fill out. At the very end came the Yes or No question: Can you drive a car? You can guess my answer. And that was it! I walked out with my license.

I’ve been driving for 82 years. It’s probably best for me to stop, especially with all those people and cars and bikes and buses in Manhattan. It’s kind of happy/sad for me, but probably safer for the rest of New York City.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

Dating on a Budget in the 1960s

By Ivan Berger

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

Back in the ’60s, when my gross salary was $75 a week, I could still afford to take a date for dinner and a cruise:
Two subway fares to Mott Street in Chinatown: $0.30.
Two noodle dishes washed down with water or free tea: $1.50.
Two subway fares to South Ferry: $0.30.
Two Staten Island Ferry fares outbound $0.10.
Two Staten Island Ferry fares inbound: $0.10.
Two subway fares back home: $0.30.

Total, $2.60.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

Grieving With a Firefighter

By Helen Malmgren

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

It’s Sept. 20. I’m thinking about my morning commute, 14 years ago today. It’s Sept. 20, 2001. I am riding the A train downtown. A New York City fireman gets on at 125th Street, and everyone in the car looks up.

He is heartbreaking in his dress blues, with his broad shoulders. We all know where he’s going. He’s going to a funeral. Every fireman is going to funerals this week.

“Was it someone from your station?” asks a woman in black heels and a pencil skirt.

The fireman says yes, then asks, “Do you want to hear about him?”

Yes, we want to hear every detail about him, and about you, and about the towers, and the flying ashes, and the bodies hitting the ground, shoeless. We want you to open up and let all the stories out; we love your stories and we love you.

The woman says yes, she’d like to hear.

Several women around the car leave their seats and approach the fireman. I do, too.

The A train starts its express run to Columbus Circle. The tunnel is roaring around us as we lean toward one another to hear the story of how our heroes fought for us, who lived and who died.

Then it’s quiet again. The bell dings, the subway doors open and we, women of New York City, snap open pairs of sunglasses and slide them over our teary eyes as we march up out of the station and into Columbus Circle. A blonde on my left nods at me and I nod back, and then we both head off to work.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

The River Watchers

By Peter Tiso

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

I spent Saturday night to Sunday morning slowly making my way around Manhattan island in a canoe, and one thing struck me among the varied scenery and changeable waters:

On every pier, dock, spit, peninsula, jetty, and wharf, no matter what fences block them or how near to completely falling into the water they are, there is a backlit person (or persons) watching the water. Some call to you as you pass, some wave, but most just follow you with their eyes. They sit or stand, they cuddle and huddle, they drink and smoke and absently flick in stones. They were there at 9 in the evening, at midnight and at 3 in the morning.

I would love to know two things: how many eyes watch the water at this moment I write just before the dawn, and if a drop of water has ever passed from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery unobserved since the land bore those names.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

‘Is That Your Money?’

By Phoebe Chao

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

Every morning, I make the same commute. On this October day, it was no different: the G train from Court Square in Queens to Nassau Avenue in Brooklyn.

I got on the train, picked a seat, and found myself next to a sluggish, tired middle-aged man. All black-clad, baseball hat, one eye closed and falling asleep. More people start boarding and crowding around us, and the train starts going. All of a sudden, a lady approaches us and asks, in a shrill voice: “Sir? Is that your money?”

I look down. Right at our feet, it’s a folded $100 bill. Maybe there’s more than one in there. I can feel my face flush as I look over at the man. He seems to have just woken as he peers up at her and says, “No.”

The train keeps on going. At the next stop, more people come on, and at this point, everyone within our vicinity is staring at this $100 bill. A teenage boy approaches and says, “Whoa!” before backing away. I can feel the tension in the car. One woman, who has just boarded, sits across from us. I see her eyes travel down to the money. She quickly jumps up, waving people out of her way, and comes to snatch it off the ground.

I watch her as she unfolds it. It’s a fake.

By this time, I’m at my stop and I look over at the man before I get off. Suddenly energized and appearing to be wide awake, he smiles at me.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Metropolitan Diary

Almost Missing Summer

By Jessica Fu

Metropolitan Diary

More Reader Tales From the City »

Dear Diary:

Today I woke up cocooned in my comforter, yet still chilly. I looked out of my window at the stale October gloom and almost began to miss summer. Almost. I caught myself in time to remember what we often forget when we romanticize seasons, forgetting their hidden wraths because we do not endure them in the present time.

I remembered consecutive weeks so sweltering that I was endlessly caught between the lesser of two hells: a stickily hot night or slightly less hot one throughout which my free-off-of-Craigslist fan would propel warm air around my room at the volume of a tractor.

I recalled ice-cold morning showers that still weren’t enough to bring my internal temperature down. I reminisced about afternoons laying about, icing last night’s mosquito bites with a tub of ice cream, a bag of frozen peas. I recollected dusks descending, finally, after I had loitered with my journal in cool (literally) coffee shops for hours, and the mercy of baristas who hadn’t kicked me out.

I remembered my unlucky penchant for always stepping into that single No. 1 train carriage that lacked air-conditioning.

So this morning, when the autumnal chill impelled me to draw my bare legs closer to my chest and pull an extra blanket around my shoulders, I almost — almost — longed for summer. But then I remembered, and I thanked goodness that I had caught myself just in time.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email [email protected] or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.