What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [105]
IF WE’RE SERIOUS about preserving scents of place, it’s not enough to capture random locations; we should survey an entire geographical area. I once accompanied a New York Observer reporter on a sniffing safari of Manhattan. It was midsummer and New York was ripe, but nailing down the actual source of the malodors wasn’t easy. The air in an upscale sports club was a tad stale but not too objectionable. Our most noxious find was a puddle of rancid sidewalk water at University Place and Thirteenth Street. Something terrible had happened there, and the ghost of it lingered in the late afternoon. The Observer reporters conducted walking tours with other nose experts and published the story along with a whimsical odor map of the city.
The guided odor tour has become a features-section standby. For example, a Washington Post reporter rides along in a limo with a perfumer and a retired sanitation worker as they make a haphazard tour of New York. They hit the usual tourist sites with predictable results: rancid pork fat in the Meatpacking District, hot frying oil in a Chinatown kitchen, and intense horse manure near the carriages in Central Park. All the while the French-born perfumer plugs her line of neighborhoods-of-New-York-themed perfumes. (Fair enough—it was her limo and driver after all.)
The New York–based gossip blog Gawker took a refreshingly egalitarian approach to urban odor mapping. It invited readers to e-mail in odor reports for every train station and subway platform in the city. The general outcome was not in doubt. (Even Paris Hilton knows the score; in her memoir she writes, “Yes, I admit I’ve taken the subway in New York—and it smells. It literally smells like pee. Why can’t they do anything about that?”) Gawker compiled the vox populi into an interactive New York City Subway Smell Map. Mouse over a particular station, and colorful icons pop up to tell you which of ten malodor categories is found there. Waiting for the A-C-E train at Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue? Gawker icons indicate the presence of body odor, feces, urine, sewage, and vomit. Need more detail? Just double-click for reader comments: “Something dead and decaying…Old outhouse poop…Fresh poop…Sewer water…Urine post–asparagus buffet…Breath of a hungry old lady…Stinks like puke.” According to the Subway Smell Map, stations on the Upper East Side are exceptionally nonodorous. This may be true, or the result of sample bias—hipsters who read Gawker may never venture that far uptown.
The ultimate objective for nasal surveyors is a navigational chart of the entire American smellscape. Is such a thing possible? Helen Keller thought so: “I can easily distinguish Southern towns by the odours of fried chicken, grits, yams and cornbread, while in Northern towns the predominating odours are of doughnuts, corn beef hash, fishballs, and baked beans.” American cities were so distinctive she had her own Olfactory Positioning System: “I used to be able to smell Duluth and St. Louis miles off by their breweries, and the fumes of the whiskey stills of Peoria, Illinois, used to wake me up at night if we passed within smelling distance of it.”
Landmark smells, even those of home, are not always pretty. The writer Celeste Bowman describes her experience in Texas: “My eyes flew open as my nose was assaulted by the acrid odor of saltwater, decomposing fish and seashells, a peculiar fragrance that I love. Sea smell is the smell of home. I was back in Corpus Christi, a guest in the city of my childhood.”
Commercial odors serve as locator beacons on the smellscape. For fifty-five years the Life Saver factory poured fruity sweetness over Port Chester, New York. The Mars candy plant keeps Hackettstown, New Jersey, smelling chocolaty, and the Maxwell House roasting operation periodically gives Hoboken a jolt of joe. A Snapple bottling plant fruitifies part of Baltimore, while a rendering plant, vinegar distillery, and giant bakery define other areas of town. McCormick & Co. blew a potpourri of spice across Baltimore for more