Scents & the City

It makes sense that a city massing together 8 million people, the world capital of the arts and finance and entertainment and diplomacy, the teeming center of countless cultures and histories and myths, should be known for a multitude of smells both foul and fair.

On one level, we're all inured to it. To the fishy smell on the streets in Chinatown and the dank slaughterhouse runoff that's still between the cobblestones in the Meatpacking District. The dog piss in the alleys, the rotting food in garbage bags waiting to be collected and the salty sea air that sometimes wafts over downtown to remind us we live in a port city.

Of course there are the food smells coming from restaurants and street carts, the Indian and Thai spices, the spicy burritos, the souvlaki steak and pretzels cooking on the vendor's grill and the roasting nuts. It is a constant sensory overload that we learn to ignore, until some out-of-towner points out the stink of the ginkgo trees in Central Park on a fall day.

New Yorkers noticed, though, when a sweet smell of unknown provenance covered the city a couple of weeks back. Whether one thought it was caramel or freshly baked pie, it was its very unusualness that perked everyone up from Staten Island to the Upper East Side.

"For some reason I thought it was my girlfriend's hair, and I asked her why her hair smelled like maple syrup; it was pretty strong," recounts Rich Chapple, who noticed the sweet odor from bed at midnight.

We are so used to tuning expected smells out, developing our anosmia, that when an unexpected one emerges, it throws us.

For some, the sweet smell struck fear. One friend of mine theorized at the time that it was some kind of chemical weapon, or at least something dangerous and toxic, but tests by the police department revealed nothing dangerous in the air. A piece in The New Yorker was more cynical, theorizing (perhaps in jest) that it might have been an elaborate ploy by real estate agents to improve sagging housing values. Some thought it might be a quick change in the weather affecting the trees. The jury is still out on the cause, but even chocolate maker Jacques Torres was reportedly questioned in the official inquiry.

The subway has its own smells. Each station has a distinctive aroma. Some stations aren't particularly bad, with just the dank wear of rust and and dirt, while others have notorious smells.

A recent NY1 report pointed out a particular station, the 51st St./Lexington Ave. stop on the 6, E and V, where a specific underground hallway besieges thousands of passengers daily with an odor that smells like something between a clogged toilet and a dead body. The MTA says the odor is the result of a broken water pump that has left standing water to collect in an elevator shaft for at least a year. The agency said they would fix it about a month ago, but the stink is still there. A similar smell can be found in certain corners of the Union Square station.

An unscientific poll of people I know revealed that almost everyone has a gripe against a particularly smelly subway station. I'm told that walking towards the R on the Canal St. station is putrid, the Brooklyn Borough Hall station reeks of dirt-infused bleach and that several 7 stations in Queens are plagued by the smell of pigeon shit. "It is as if the same sandwich has been rotting there since the dawn of time," says one friend of the uptown platform on the 125th St. A, B, C and D.

There are, though, some neutral odors-and even good ones-in the subway. The 16th St. entrance to the 14th St. F stop always smells of freshly cooked bacon, while a "fantastic chocolate smell" lingers around the Bond/Hoyt St. and Carroll St. stations.

Veronique Ferval, director of fragrance development for International Flavors and Fragrances, says that no matter how much we complain, New York's subways smell better than those in Paris, where "there is more of a scent of sweat and perfumes on the Metro because there is no air conditioning. At the same time, people's hygiene here is also better compared to Europe, so often there are clean and subtle fragrances on the train. Sometimes you can smell people's detergent."

When I went to investigate many of the other subway smells, most struck me as sort of mundane; the usual choking sweetness outside Perfumania, the pleasant sugar and honey smell of the street around bakeries and the noxious industrial smell of mechanic shops along 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn; paint thinner, hydraulic fuel, gasoline. Even the steam coming out of the grates in the street and the burning smell of electricity near some manholes weren't so unusual.

Some were bad but kind of weirdly reassuring. The air pushed out of vents near hospitals and the interiors of buses on cold, stormy days (wet wool meets sweat). The incense burning at Union Square is awful, but it's always there, as is the smell of hookah pipes near the Middle Eastern places along Steinway St. in Astoria and the grease vents outside the diner on 101st and Broadway.

Rayda Vega, a perfumer at Quest International, says New York is a particularly odorific city because of the volume of garbage produced daily.

"No other city in the United States has the amount of garbage put out in the street for pickup," observes Veda. "This gives New York a very 'ripe' smell after 10 at night, except on Saturday night, when the garbage is saved up for Sunday."

Ferval says this kind of garbage smell is particularly bad during the summer, when New York's humid climate makes it more susceptible to odors hanging in the air, leaving heavy, pungent aromas to exacerbate and fester and intensify. But she notes that there are always fragrance respites.

"There are extreme negative smells, but New York also has extreme positives," says Ferval. She says that the city's good smells can be characterized as "sugary" as opposed to Paris' "buttery." She advocates a walk along the West Side Highway for the breeze from the ocean, or a stroll through Chelsea Market to cleanse palates of foul scents.

Upon returning home to Omaha or Dubuque, it's likely many tourists tell their friends about the intensity of the smells in the five boroughs. The rich, heavy aromas may, in fact, be one of the reasons that they think the city's fun to visit "but I wouldn't want to live there." For many of us, it is our sense of smell that orients us and gives streets distinction and sense of place.

And maybe because of this, when I'm out in the country, breathing fresh air that smells vaguely like pine and away from the heavy city, I often can't sleep.