In keeping with the thing that brought them all there, the event, planned by 'City' essayists Saara Dutton and Tommy Pryor, was a small and slightly eccentric affair.

Mr. Pryor, 55, grew up in the city and only started writing five or six years ago. In February 2008, he contributed an essay about putting his mother in a headlock as a kid and another one about infiltrating the Yankees bullpen with his father.

Ms. Dutton said she was inspired to move to New York in equal parts by the city she saw depicted on Sesame Street and in SPY Magazine as a kid growing up in Honolulu and Seattle. She moved to New York three weeks after 9/11 and went on to write a piece for 'City' about Duane Reade's shopping bags headlined Sacks and the City and a few other pieces over the years.

"Truly, as a person who always wanted to move here, it's like our section," Ms. Dutton enthused.

Of the section's ending, she said, "I think it's incredibly sad."

Mr. Pryor explained that the event was originally planned as a wake—a loving, boozy, Irish-style wake—but that "out of respect" for the section's editors, it was reframed as a toast.

(While this party wasn't organized by the paper of record, Connie Rosenblum, the editor of 'City' since 1999, told The Observer by telephone earlier in the day that she wished she could be there. "I'm sure it's gonna be wonderful," she said.)

Part of the wonderfulness involved the hiring of a bagpipe player, who kicked things off with his rendition of "Amazing Grace" and made a pretty picture in a modified NYPD uniform including kilt and spats; the small group of attendees hushed up and the rest of the room, full of after-work drinkers, didn't seem to mind the pipes or the half- dozen digital cameras whirring away.

Before he started, The Observer asked the bagpiper—who wouldn't give his name—what he thought of the event he'd been hired to perform at. "A buddy of mine was supposed to do this but he called me at noon and asked me to do this for him," he said.

Did he know what the event was all about? "No, not really," he said with the sort of thick outer borough accent Tom Wolfe once examined in his New York essay Honks and Wonks.

When a reporter explained to him that it was a tribute to a section of The New York Times that had been discontinued, the piper admitted he didn't really read the paper much. "I'm an online kinda guy," he said.

"The City section was one of my favorite sections of the newspaper," said the novelist and essayist Thomas Beller by telephone from New Orleans, where he's currently teaching at Tulane University. "I'm quite upset about it as a reader."

Essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley called it "a legitimate loss, both literally and symbolically."

Since 1993, City had been a quiet, quirky presence within the larger local edition of the Sunday Times. Edited by Connie Rosenblum since 1997, City took a street-level view of the five boroughs that felt like a break from the multiple-front assault of status anxieties unleashed by the pre-recession Style, Real Estate, and Travel sections, and the various versions of the high-end style guide T.

Unlike its glammier sister sections, City was for smaller subjects like Adam B. Ellick's 2007 piece about the dumpling-making women of St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church or Jennifer Bleyer's last go 'round at the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights from the same year. It was a place for Times reporters like Charlie LeDuff (now of The Detroit News) to flex more Joseph Mitchell–ish chops and bend his elbows once a week. But, most especially, it was a place for writers to wax poetic about life in New York City, to write personal essays that might not have found a home anywhere else. (This reporter, included.)

"My favorite part of the section is New York Observed," said The Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu, referring to the (usually) first-person essays in the section. "I like the scale of New York Observed. There was an appropriateness of scale that is rarer and rarer and as a result more and more precious."

Mr. Hajdu, who recently wrote an essay about Riverside Park, applauded the section's "absence of hype and zeitgeist," saying the editors tend to "ignore and even defy the buzz."

Essayist and novelist Phillip Lopate, who contributed to the section ever since Ms. Rosenblum brought him over from her previous section, Arts & Leisure, seemed to agree. "What I'm finding in newspapers in general and The Times in particular is that on the one hand you have the standard journalistic writing with its contemporary clichés. ... And then you have the entertainment pages in which The Times, playing catch-up, is more and more trying to sound hip. But they never can," he told The Observer. "So they fling around all these slang terms like 'the big kahuna'—that was in the paper yesterday. And, there's something a little bit coarse and vulgar about this attempt to wink-wink at the reader.

"The City section was something different," he said. "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, so in a way, Connie is in an awkward place."

Ms. Rosenblum, whose book about the Bronx's Grand Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams, will be coming out in August, told readers of the NYTimes.com's Talk to the Newsroom what she looked for in 2008: "[W]e ask our writers and ourselves to use eyes and ears, to walk the streets of individual neighborhoods and see firsthand what's out there. This approach can yield rich rewards."

The result is pieces like this week's "Plot Twist at the Actors’ Temple" or "The Trouble With Trees". It may also explain why writers find themselves mourning the loss of the section. One of them, Thomas Pryor, will be hosting a "toast" to the section on May 4 at the bar 17: It's hard to imagine a  similar event in honor of, say, Escapes, which is also being folded into the larger Times.

"Where are we gonna find those pieces—those neighborhood pieces?" Mr. Hajdu wondered. "I'm not inclined to over-romanticize or glorify the mundane, but what you'd find there in unexpected quarters of the City were wonderful surprises."

Mr. Lopate, who has written profiles of architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable as well as numerous essays about Robert Moses, the AIA Guide, and other topics for City, calls those sorts of articles "urban sketches." He said that he and Mr. Beller, who has a Web site devoted to the genre, had once fantasized about putting together an anthology.

"The urban sketches are a noble form which has a long relationship to newspapers," Mr. Lopate said. "Connie was recruiting writers to stretch out and do things which were reflective. Of course, newspapers have very little room for that. They used to have much more room for it." In the past a writer like George Plimpton could dash off a Talk of the Town about a man talking to himself on an imaginary cellular phone for The New Yorker, but good luck getting something like that in print today.

"I think that writers of any age who are into quirky, slice-of-life pieces that used to run a lot more in Talk of the Town and still do occasionally, it kind of was the only game in town," said Jetpack Dreams author and City contributor Mac Montandon. "For a lot of people it was the first section of The Times they wrote for. For younger journalists, it's a huge loss."

In her Talk to the Newsroom chat, Ms. Rosenblum addressed those young journalists, saying, "We rely largely on a small (half a dozen at the peak) group of young or youngesh [sic] journalists, many of them not long out of journalism school, who have an interest in writing about city affairs and don't mind the ups and downs of the freelance life."

When the redesigned Sunday Metro section hits newsstands May 24, we'll see how much room is left for those writers and their work in The New York Times. Mr. Beller is hopeful that some of Ms. Rosenblum's formula will continue to find a home. "I think the importance of the City section is not that it's a stand-alone section but that it had an editorial mission distinct from the paper," said Mr. Beller, who's written about everything from lost gloves to his apartment for the section. "It's not about coverage, it's about the kind of pieces they ran."

"Its not The Southern Oracle," Ms. Crosley—who's written several of the New York Observed essays—emailed from Paris, referring to the last-chance entry from the children's film The Neverending Story. "There are other ways in. But the City's seat within The Times mimicked the very beat it covered. [I]t always maintained a neighborhood vibe."

"Who wouldn't be sad to see that go?" she asked. "It's like watching your favorite building get torn down."

The news comes on the heels of The Times’ salary cuts. 

The newsroom has been buzzing about the imminent demise of the City Section since Thursday afternoon, when Bill Keller gave a newsroom address and said that the paper was looking to cut back on freelancers as much as possible. A staffer asked what that would mean for the City Section, the regionals and Escapes, which use material almost entirely written by freelancers. Mr. Keller said that the masthead editors were reviewing their options, which didn't spell good news to several attendees.

Connie Rosenblum, the City Section editor, referred a phone call to New York Times Company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. Ms. Mathis, when reached Sunday night, said, “We are going to decline to comment.”

Mr. Keller has been working with top editors at the paper in trying to find a way to preserve content from the weekly sections. For instance, they are still drafting a plan that would allow an extra page or two of space within the paper's New York section where they could use material that would have gone in the stand-alone sections in the past. Likewise, Escapes material could be used in the Travel section.

The City section, unlike the paper’s local news section, has always tried to feel like a small-town paper nestled in the Sunday Times. Stories about how the South Brooklyn Casket Company inspires poets and artists sat side-by-side with paeans to Riverside Park. The section has also been a comfortable space for essayists like Sloane Crosley and Thomas Beller to muse on various off-news-cycle topics like dance or dropping an iPod on the subway tracks.

The regionals were stylistically the same, but since a decision reached in 2006 to eliminate most of the original content specific to each region in favor of consolidated material used for all the regionals, it has been a shell of what it once was. Last month, the paper started The Local, a blog that is aiming for that small-town feel in parts of brownstone Brooklyn and suburban New Jersey.