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

From nytimes.com

By James Barron

It’s the 50th anniversary year of Metropolitan Diary, a feature that sheds light on everyday life in New York City

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 New York Times

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?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/nyregion/metropolitan-diary-50th-anniversary.html