Last Monday morning, anyone around town who stepped outside expecting either a loamy first whiff of spring or some more familiar indigenous reek discovered instead the faint but unmistakable smell of woodsmoke. Not burning-building woodsmokiness, which in these parts, thanks to the alacrity of the fire department, typically comes in the dismal, water-soaked variety, but real, woodsy woodsmokiness. Campfires. The air was thick and kind of yellow. It brought to mind Idaho in July—not sage-and-dew Idaho, or dung-and-diesel Idaho, but droughty-combustible Idaho. We shall call this scent Ponderosa Apocalypse.
It didn’t take long for the news to spread that the source was indeed a forest fire—a forest fire!—in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, about a hundred miles southwest. In a way, it was a bummer to find out so fast. In 2005, a mysterious odor of maple syrup began wafting over from Jersey, and it took the authorities years to identify the source. (Eventually, they traced it to fenugreek seeds at a flavor-and-fragrance plant in Bergen County.) In the interim, speculation opened minds, and noses. People paid closer attention to the city’s smells. It was like a movie in which a charismatic stranger comes to town, dazzles everyone, and then, exposed as a cheat, flees, leaving the townspeople to reflect on how little they’ve appreciated what they had all along.
This is the beginning of smelly season. Post-thaw, olfactory New York springs to life. The freeze this year was a long, hard one, by mid-Atlantic standards, and so one predicts an abrupt release. In the parks, the dogs are going bonkers, and even humans can pick up on the residual scent of the turds that dog owners somehow felt the snow absolved them from having to scoop up. As the days heat up, the sewage stench on the north side of Forty-second Street just west of Sixth Avenue—Eau de Bank of America—ripens, and the ruts of horse shit along Central Park South begin to sing. At certain subway stops, the odor of rotting flesh returns, as though from a winter in Arizona, and all over town you can enjoy the blossoming of that chief attribute of New York: the smell of urine. Bus exhaust, hot garbage, clove cigarettes, Axe cologne. Some of it is a matter of taste. The sickly sweetness of the roasted-nut carts is to the nose what the Andean pan-flute ensembles are to the ear. Spring, of course, is generally associated with nice smells: magnolia, then crab apple, then lilacs, then rain on warm pavement and block-party barbecue.
In 2011, a state legislator from Staten Island proposed that New York adopt an official smell. He nominated pine: aspirational, perhaps, or else the delusion of a homer. It might be better to defer to an outsider, a fresh set of nostrils. In February of last year, an “olfactory artist” from Antwerp named Peter de Cupere—the inventor of the Blind Smell Glove, which can smell anything you touch, and the Olfactiano, a piano that emits scents—came to New York for a long weekend, but, owing to the cold, he couldn’t get a good read on how the city smelled. All his previous visits had been in winter, too. So, while here, he decided to ask other people about it—strangers on the street, whose answers he recorded on camera and assembled as a work under the rubric “NY Smells Like.”
“The people, they really had to think about it,” he said last week, on the phone from Belgium. “They were thinking for two or three minutes before they could answer. It’s very strange that people don’t know the smell of their own city. People don’t know how to smell anymore.”
Even so, he, too, found it hard to narrow down a New York smell. “Around every corner there is a different fragrance,” he said. “I think of a city’s smell like a dialect. Every city in Belgium has a dialect—one dialect. But in New York you have a lot of dialects.”
He went on, “Most of the time, New York is smelling bad, to be honest. But I don’t mean that in a negative way. The women smell good! And the MOMA—it smells nice. It has a cozier smell than the Guggenheim.”
The city gave him ideas. “There’s life in New York under the ground,” he said. “I find exciting the smoke coming out of the ground. If they want to perfume the city, you could put fragrances in the smoke. I’m willing to do that. That is a dream for me. Imagine if Fifth Avenue smelled of strawberries, or roses. And another avenue, it smelled of lilac. A blind person could find his way around. At each crossroads, you could have the smell of burned meat”—perhaps he was not aware that this is already the case—“and the blind would know where they were! There are so many possibilities.” ♦
