The 50-Year-Old Diary That’s Very Dear to Readers

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today the last will go first. For once we’ll put Metropolitan Diary, which comes at the end of New York Today, front and center. We’ll also look at the risks Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking by making endorsements in tomorrow’s Democratic primary.

You know it’s there. You scroll down to read it. You smile, or not. You chuckle, or not. Maybe you think: Could that have happened anywhere but New York?

I’m talking about Metropolitan Diary, of course.

It’s the New York-centric coda to everything else in New York Today, a potpourri of readers’ stories, poems, observations and reminiscences. My colleague Alex Vadukul calls it “the city’s daily poetry,” and sometimes it is poetry. Or else it’s a few paragraphs about the lovers’ quarrels on sidewalks, the acts of kindness on public transportation, the friendships forged on park benches.

This is the 50th anniversary year of Metropolitan Diary, so let’s take a moment to look at something that no one takes for granted — certainly not Ed Shanahan, the latest in a long line of Times reporters and editors who have curated it. The first was Tom Buckley, who had covered the United Nations and the war in Vietnam.

Ed’s responsibilities include culling readers’ submissions, which open with the two-word salutation “Dear Diary.” Email has made that part of the job easier than when Metropolitan Diary started in 1976 and readers’ handwriting had to be deciphered.

The genesis

The brainstorm that led to Metropolitan Diary is credited to the influential Times editor Arthur Gelb at a moment when The Times was creating new feature sections. The idea behind Metropolitan Diary was to bring in user-generated content that was different from letters to the editor. The diary would be for and about urban living, not commentary on policy matters or articles The Times had published.

Metropolitan Diary first ran in the Living section, published on Wednesdays until 1997, when the Wednesday feature section was refocused on food. That was when Metropolitan Diary became the responsibility of the Metro desk, and eventually became a part of New York Today.

Originally, The Times sent Moët & Chandon to contributors whose submissions were published. “We were in a celebratory mood and figured, ‘What the hell?’” Gelb later recalled. “Money was pouring in. Ads were going up. Circulation was going up.” Later the Champagne was replaced by coffee mugs. For the last 10 years or so, publication has been the only reward.

Metropolitan Diary has now had a longer life than its inspiration, a newspaper column called The Conning Tower that was essential reading when Gelb was young. It was the work of Franklin P. Adams, who hopped from newspaper to newspaper from 1913 to 1941, taking along The Conning Tower — and, presumably, his audience.

Adams was so well known that he was often referred to by his initials, even in The Times, where he never worked. “F.P.A. Leaving The Post” read the headline over the Times article about the end of The Conning Tower in 1941.

F.P.A.’s Saturday columns imitated the style of Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th-century London diarist.

When a collection of Conning Tower diary columns was published in book form in the 1930s, one reviewer observed that “it is good to pick up a simple diary of luncheons, dinners, beakers of buttermilk, books, plays, wives, children.”

Then the reviewer said: “It helps one understand how human life has managed to persist on this planet in the face of events recorded in other world-shaking diaries.”

Doesn’t that sound like the perfect description of Metropolitan Diary?

Weather

Today, expect mostly cloudy conditions, possible showers and thunderstorms, and a high near 77. Rain is expected to continue tonight as temperatures fall near 68.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until July 3 (Independence Day observed)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“It was dying off. Then TikTok made it a thing.” — Kevin Ellis, the chief executive of a dairy company in Buffalo, on the popularity of cottage cheese. Sales surged 82 percent from 2022 to 2025, when they totaled more than $2 billion.

The latest Metro news

Dusting off their Knicks banner: Two retired New York City Sanitation Department workers, friends since grade school, carried a banner at the ticker-tape parade last week that they made in 1973, the last time the Knicks won a championship.
Remains are found in a house sold at auction: The winning bidder for a foreclosed house in Connecticut discovered the skeletal remains of three people after entering the residence. The identities of the people and their causes of death are still unknown.
A fraudster’s clemency: The Trump administration shuttered a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn who were examining the circumstances behind the president’s clemency grant that freed a private equity executive who was convicted in a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.
A fatal fall at Madison Square Garden: A 51-year-old man died after falling from a balcony during a concert by the band Goose on Saturday night.

For Mamdani, a potentially risky primary

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is risking his political capital in the Democratic primary tomorrow by working to unseat two House incumbents, Daniel Goldman, who represents parts of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Adriano Espaillat, who represents Harlem, northern Manhattan and parts of the Bronx.

That means that the primary will be about more than those races. It will be a test of Mamdani’s political power. A win by the candidates he has campaigned for will cement his reputation as a kingmaker. My colleagues Nicholas Fandos and Sally Goldenberg write that a string of losses could be disastrous.

Mamdani and his allies consider Goldman and Espaillat too friendly to corporate donors and Israel. His involvement in the primary has alienated supporters that helped him win City Hall last year — Black and Latino progressives, labor unions and the left-leaning Working Families Party. Some, like Representative Nydia Velázquez, have gone public, saying that they have lost trust in him.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won last year by drawing a large number of young voters to the polls, undercutting more moderate older voters. But without him on the ballot this time around, after a week of early voting, the turnout appeared to be trending toward being more modest and older.

That was enough to prompt the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America to call an emergency meeting to discuss what one leader called the “cratering” youth vote. Mamdani himself spent much of the weekend campaigning shoulder to shoulder with the candidates he has endorsed.

The mayor is soft-pedaling concerns about the early turnout and says he is willing to accept collateral damage. “There will always be risk when it comes to making a decision about how best to fight for working people,” he said in an interview after a rally in Brooklyn on Thursday, “and I believe that it is worth it when it comes to these candidates.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Morning routine

Dear Diary:

I was living in Astoria and working for an animation company in Chelsea. My commute on the N made me feel like a real New Yorker. I would get my coffee and wait on the elevated platform with hundreds of my neighbors at 8:30 a.m., no matter the weather, no matter my mood.

I started to recognize people, getting used to faces and commuting patterns during the almost three years I had that job. I saw pregnancies and fights and hairstyle changes.

I didn’t often speak to these people, nor did they speak to me, but there was a recognition that we all took the same train. I liked it; it made me feel safe to recognize and be recognized by these people.

One January morning, I was holding a large coffee in one hand and the center subway pole with the other. It was crowded, and I was lost in thought. The train jerked suddenly, I lost my grip on the cup and it flew into the back of a woman in front of me.

The lid came off, and coffee poured down the back of her now-not-entirely-white winter coat. She didn’t flinch. Maybe it was the weight of the jacket, but she just stood there unaware.

What do I do? Do I tell her? How do I fix this?

An older woman whom I recognized from our daily trips together clocked the whole drama. She was standing next to me, reading a book.

I looked at her with panic in my eyes.

She looked at the coat, and then back at me.

“Run,” she said.

And without any thought, that’s what I did.

To the woman whose coat I covered in coffee: I am sorry. To the woman who advised me to bolt: Thank you for your support.

— Andrew Rannells

Rannells is an actor. He appears in the HBO film “Miss You, Love You.”

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].