The NY Times will soon close the stand-alone City Section--home to quirky, elegant essays about different corners of the city. In a NY Observer article, writers around the country mourned the passing including Thomas Beller, Sloane Crosley, and David Hajdu.

While the stand-alone section is gone, some of the reporting will be included in the paper's Metro section. Many of these great stories were collected in "New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times," which can be found here.

Author Phillip Lopate had strong feelings about the section: "The prose style was on a higher level than that kind of excessively casual, 'We're all fascinated with rap stars' kind of writing .... Part of the problem is, looking at it from a larger perspective, that The Times has so much talent in these slightly older editors. They're just so scared of a graying demographic that they keep wanting to get younger and hipper."