Metropolitan Diary

Hidden World
Dear Diary:

My phone died on 23rd Street, leaving me stranded with a dead battery and zero sense of direction in Manhattan’s supposedly foolproof grid system.

“Hudson Yards?” I asked a man walking past me.

“Jimmy,” he said, introducing himself and shaking my hand. “You’re headed the wrong way, friend.”

He turned west, and I fell into step beside him. Within two blocks, he had opened a window into a world I’d never noticed.

“See the circles?” he said, gesturing to the manhole covers beneath our feet. “That’s Con Edison, electrical stuff. The hexagons are telephone lines.”

“Con Edison’s got thousands of these scattered around,” he continued. “N.Y.C. sewer covers too.”

I looked down. Every cover told a different story.

“People think I’m odd,” Jimmy said with a gentle smile, “but I collect pictures of these things. Got about three hundred so far. My daughter says it’s strange, but I tell her somebody’s got to pay attention to what keeps this city breathing.”

We passed a Duane Reade. Jimmy waved at the cashier through the window.

“That’s Miguel,” he said. “Been there eight years. Heart of gold.”

At 30th Street, Jimmy pointed ahead.

“See those towers?” he said. “That’s your Hudson Yards. Not much to look at, but you can’t miss them.”

Before I could thank him properly, he was on his way, probably to discover more hidden patterns.

— Ishani Patel

Run It Back
Dear Diary:

Every weekday morning when I lived in Morningside Heights, I would come out of the elevator, walk through my building’s cavernous lobby and across Riverside Drive to wait for the downtown M5 bus.

At least once a week, I’d realize I had forgotten something I needed. Back I would go: across Riverside Drive, through the lobby, into the elevator and upstairs to grab whatever I’d forgotten.

Invariably, when I came back downstairs and into the lobby, our doorman would say: “Mrs. Wilde, Scene 1, Take 2.”

— Wendy Schmalz Wilde

ust Enough
Dear Diary:

I grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn. My mother shopped at the corner grocery store, which sold lox by the pound.

She would often buy enough for one or two bagels, not unusual in our relatively poor neighborhood. She called it a half of a quarter of a pound.

Many years later, when I was an adult and living in Flatbush, I had the urge for a bagel with lox.

I stopped off at a nearby supermarket, went to the counter where the fish was sold and ordered an eighth of a pound of lox.

The gentleman cutting the lox paused and looked at me.

“Having company?” he asked.

— Howard Rubin

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html