The New York Times City Section is another of the numerous newspaper casualties of 2009. It will close in the next few weeks. The section, which is wide open to freelancers, was one of the first places I got a journalistic break in New York. My first article, about Mimi, is one of the few stories I still take pleasure in rereading.

In the current economic climate, I’m not surprised to see the City close. But I do wonder what will happen to all the stories that could have been published there from now on. Undoubtedly, some will find a home in other sections, like Style or Real Estate. But the majority will likely never be published. After all, those other sections are largely written in-house, whereas many of the City’s finest stories originate from far outside Times HQ. Take one of the highlight of this weekend’s edition, for example, a first-person piece by a lecturer on Russian and comparative literature at Baruch College, who writes of his unsuccessful attempt to turn his immigration to America, in the early 1990s, into a period of Dostoevskian suffering:

America — complacent, material America — would become my crucible. I would taste the bread of exile and dream of returning to Russia as other Jews dreamed of returning to Jerusalem.

Initially, however, I found it hard to be miserable in New York in the way I wanted. Survival came obscenely easy: Whereas back in the crisis-crippled Kiev we had to be up by 4 a.m. to assume our turn in grim lines for bread and milk, here one was always steps away from the Whitmanesque bounty of the nearest supermarket.

Whatever the city’s fabled cultural decay, I found the place not so much rotten as dull. The metropolitan gaudiness, the hustle and bustle, the fever and the throb left me cold; it all seemed so predictable, even bland. Where was the angst?

Still, I persevered in mining the city for its pockets of misery. I enrolled in college, dropped out and re-enrolled. I took commissions for family portraits, only to abandon them halfway.

Then, too, there were our Babbitt-like Americanized relatives who came by to speak of cars and loans and mortgages. There were girls who objectified you, therapists who misunderstood you, physicians who misdiagnosed you.

THE trouble, though, was that none of this self-inflicted grief amounted to authentic disaster. It wasn’t just that most of my complaints were, at bottom, predictable immigrant grievances — food has no taste, flowers have no smell, etc. It was also that this city — the big, bad monster I so desperately battled — could also be, as I was beginning to surmise, genuinely, crushingly, inescapably good. The nights out in the Village. The Brooklyn Bridge. What was I to do with all those beguiling plenitudes on this foreign ground I’d been so desperate to oppose?

His answer was to paint.