Scents and the City

Late at night, while I am lying at home in bed, I can often hear very distant sounds that normally would be hidden during the daytime. The reason for this is something called “background noise”. You can’t really grab hold of background noise, but it is definitely there, and in much greater volume during the day. Background noise is a composite of millions of sounds going on in the environment that have mixed together to such a degree that it is homogeneous to the human ear, with individual components indiscernible. It is most noticed by its absence (or least its diminished volume) during the wee, dark hours of late night/early morning.

I have discovered that there is another oft unnoticed assault on our senses besides background noise: background smell. For anyone who has ever paid a visit to the more rural, agricultural areas, this often translates into the perception that one has been plunged into a deep pit of manure. But looking around, there is often no indication of the sort. It permeates the olfactory nerves, although with time spent there this background smell will fade to the point of not being noticed. And now we come to my brief half-week experience in New York City, more specifically Manhattan.

I didn’t notice it the first day I was there (we only arrived in the evening anyway), but by early afternoon the next day, it was unmistakable: there was a peculiar smell to everything in Manhattan. It wasn’t as if any place or object smelled more strongly of this odor, which I haven’t smelled elsewhere; the smell was everywhere, indoors or outdoors. It had an organic quality to it, of something sweet and at the same time in decay. And as my stay lengthened to two, then three days, it was unmistakably omnipresent and unshakable. But time we got out of there and back in Newark, New Jersey, that odor dissipated and I haven’t smelled it since. What was it?

I can only report my experience, which was starkly real to me. What caused the odor in Manhattan is a matter of speculation. But I consider the nature of Manhattan, with its massively dense population, along with the general exclusion of flora, the sense of closed-in air due to the nature of high-rise buildings, and the heavy concentration of said buildings, streets, and the materials that compose them, and I conclude that, like with sound, the smell was a homogeneous combination of humanity, its wastes, and the materials composing the buildings and roads WITHOUT the cleansing presence of the plant life that is usually preponderant elsewhere (Central Park and the other parks notwithstanding). If you’ve ever been there, have you experienced this odor in NYC, and if so what do you think is responsible? I wonder whether other really big cities exhibit the same type of phenomenon. My nearby Jacksonville, which sadly thinks of itself as a big city, can make no claim to any peculiar “background smell” as far as I can detect.

I hesitated to write about this for a while because, for some reason, we humans have collectively decided that discussing odors carries with it some kind of taboo value. Stating that a whole city “smells” can easily be read as an insult to that community. However I mean nothing of the kind by this observation. On the other hand, since I already criticized NYC to some degree for its almost compulsive willingness to beseech money from me, I’ve probably already offended them once anyway, so why not again? Who knows, maybe lifelong New Yorkers who finally venture beyond their city limits think everything on the outside has a peculiar smell!