Dumbo Arts Center 30 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY
Thank you for joining the Smelling Committee today, over 100 years after the Committee’s first olfactory expedition, to map out some of the odors that are here in this neighborhood of New York City.
For a touch of history, I will bring you back to 1891 when, “Irritated by the foul stenches that wafted through their northeast Brooklyn neighborhood, members of the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee embarked on a boat trip up Newtown Creek in September… in search of the responsible parties. They reached a point across from the oil refineries where ‘the stenches began asserting themselves with all the vigor of fully developed stenches.’ What the Smelling Committee quickly discovered was that an unusually heavy concentration of industrial activity… had transformed the area around Newtown Creek into an ecological wasteland.” The Committee deemed the Creek the most polluted body of water in the State of New York, and it remains one of the most polluted rivers in the country.
We will not be venturing all the way to Newtown Creek today, but we’re going to investigate what else is smelling in the city.
As you are sniffing, it might be useful to think about how the olfactory system works. Your olfactory regions are moist, fatty and richly yellow. The deeper yellow your olfactory region, the more perceptive your sense of smell.
Inside your nose are about 1,000 odor receptors, of which only about 347 are functional. Each receptor contains thousands of sensory neurons, totaling about 5 million. Dogs, however, possess approximately 220 million olfactory neurons. Unlike neurons in the brain or other organs which are gone forever once destroyed, these neurons in your nose are replaced about once a month and protrude like coral branches. On the neurons are tiny cilia branches to which odorant molecules attach when they are captured in a sniff. These odorant molecules are thought to have different shapes that fit like a lock and key into spaces on the neurons. Musks are like discs and airy odors are often rod-shaped. When the cilia capture the odorants, the neurons send an electric signal to the brain’s olfactory bulb, which is just a few centimeters behind your nose. Although it is presently under intense research, it is theorized that a complex spatial mapping of the different triggered receptors permits the brain to identify and remember a scent. Like popcorn, with real or artificial butter. And about 10,000 other odors.
There is a unique gene that encodes each of the 1,000 odor receptors, making the olfactory system the largest known gene family in the human body. That says a lot about the complexity of odor. By comparison, just three receptors on the retina allow us to distinguish among several hundred color hues. It does help to shut off those three receptors in your retina when trying to smell things, so take time sniffing with your eyes closed.
Almondine 85 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY
Taste is actually composed of over 80% odor passing across our nasal passages at the soft palette in our mouths. People suffering from a loss of smell, or anosmia, almost entirely lose all sense of taste as well. The smell of such things as baked butterfat, almond paste, honeyed lime, fresh eggs in lemon curd and warmed cocoa are all reduced to textures and such broad categories as sweet, salty, bitter and sour. The unique combinations of scent are what render food delectable and unforgettable.
One of the most famous odor and flavor-induced memories comes from Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time. Most of our odor memories take us back to the first 10 years of life. Common folklore surrounding the link between odor and memory prompted neuroscientists to coin the term the “Proust Phenomenon,” after the smell and taste of the author’s legendary limeflower tea-logged madelaine cookie that sent him on a multi-tomed trek into visions of past memories.
But recent research has shown that while odor may not be a stronger trigger of memory than verbal or visual stimuli, it arouses a more emotional response and is connected to older memories. Smell is unique in its ability to directly access the amygdala, an emotional center of the brain that is part of the limbic system governing survival behaviors like emotion, appetite, fear, reproduction, the storage of memories and their relation to physical sensation. While a fear-inducing experience may only need a single association with an odor to set your adrenaline going the next time you catch a whiff of the same substance, positive correlations with odors take a much longer time to develop. More emotionally-arousing information increases amygdalar activity, and that activity correlates with retention.
Odor is also one of our most important sources of information about the external world, familiarizing us with what our home smells like and alerting us to whether something is wrong if it smells different. We form strong associations with odor through repetition. Although you may be smelling a bakery right now, it may not remind you of food at all. The grandmother of one Smelling Committee member, for example, used to wear vanilla as perfume. Whenever she made cookies, her husband would get an erection. The repeated associations of the vanilla smell with his wife’s body and sexuality led to a strong physiological and emotional response to the smell of vanilla in any context.
dumbo Water between Main & Dock Streets, Brooklyn, NY
Neighborhoods have their own unique smells, usually formed by who lives and works there. In many New York neighborhoods, there is a sharp disjuncture between the combined cultural smells of a neighborhood’s residents and the lingering industrial warehouses or the growing commercial markets. Their co-existence makes for distinct olfactory blends. What could be the smell of the co-existence of yuppie immigrants, shoe rubber, new condominium cement, shelters, steel restaurant appliances and vintage furniture in this neighborhood? What else can you find?
The South Street Seaport Fishmarket that was until recently located in Lower Manhattan, was steeped in tradition and the strong smell of fish guts. When it moved to its new, modern facility in the Bronx with efficient ventilation, the smell of fish was gone and with it the sense of tradition for many of the fish mongerers.
One Smelling Committee member described the odor of his Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn as a pungent co-mingling of mangoes and piss. In the mornings, Canal Street and Broadway smells like furry wet metal coated in cold fish oil and hot bacon grease.
Over a hundred years ago, Canal St. still smelled fishy and marshy. When New York was the oyster-producing capital of the world, you could buy all-you-can-eat oysters raw or fried, for 6 cents there. Canal Street was converted from a Canal to a street in 1811. It channeled water from a fresh water lake called Collect Pond, just west of what is now Chinatown. When the lake festered and stank with disease and too many pollutants from tanneries, breweries and other industries, it was filled with dirt and turned into a landfill, on the edge of which was built the notorious Five Points slum. Canal Street was also filled and harbored the fishy smells of oyster saloons and brothels for years to come.
Does your neighborhood have a distinct cultural or ethnic identity? Does it make it smell a particular way? What does your water smell like? What does the odor of your neighborhood say about the way you live?
West Elm & Starbucks 75 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY
We may think of odor as an unconsidered by-product of some needlessly aromatic activity. Body odor as a by-product of physical exertion, or hot dog stands as just the way meat smells when it’s cooked. But many of the odors of food and everyday products are the result of crafted additives. Smells are a huge cash crop in the Metro area.
New Jersey has several smell factories, and the International Flavors and Fragrances company has its headquarters in Manhattan. The IFF crafts the perfumes of many top designers including Dior, Chanel, Guerlain, Yves Saint Laurent and Estée Lauder, as well as MacDonald’s, Samsung, pop celebrities, laundry soap and fake Christmas trees. And everything is top secret.
Odors rely on fatty oils and absorption by water molecules to be observed by our noses. Which is why it’s so hard to smell anything in the dead of winter, things are more smelly in the rain, and also why our own bodies are excellent launching pads for odors of all kinds. We are moist and oily.
Our aromatic paranoia of smelling too human makes for a lucrative and complex perfume industry. The replication of worldly odors is a multifarious artform less involved in the distillation of essences than the bizarre combination of chemical compounds and synthetic molecules.
What Smelling Committee members may wish to note as well is the careful attention to odor association that some businesses are testing in their stores in a pervasive attempt at olfactory branding.
Samsung’s flagship store on the Upper West Side smells faintly tropical, sweet and melony with its new odor identity, also developed by the IFF. Sony also has a unique scent in its stores, which it sends home in sachets in its shopping bags, and is considering impregnating in its plastic packaging. Not only electronics corporations but hotel chains, diamond retailers, amusement parks, golf companies, automobile manufacturers and cell phone stores have also taken advantage of environmental smell technologies. Verizon spent a year developing the chocolate fragrance that accompanied the displays of its LG Chocolate phones, and tested its multinational appeal on noses across the globe.
Careful attention has been paid to gendering products, as market research has shown that buyers are twice as likely to stick around and purchase clothing if the ambient odor is feminine for women’s clothing, and masculine for men’s clothing. If women’s clothing is scented with a masculine odor, women are less likely to stick around and buy, and vise versa for men.
Olfactory branding is rather hit or miss, as there are few odors with mass appeal and odors are not drugs. But the idea is to directly tap into the limbic system of consumers by establishing an emotional memory that connects olfactory recognition with a brand identity. Smelling Committee members know that it takes longer for a positive olfactory association to be developed than a negative one. Nonetheless, initial studies have shown that, at the very least, pleasant odors tailored to consumers increase receptiveness to a product, the number of times they examine a product, how long they linger over an item, and sometimes that they are willing to pay higher prices. Only more reason to bring one’s consciousness into a daily awareness of olfactory experience.
Gleason's Gym 77 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY
What does fitness smell like? We excrete more than just sweat, salt and bodily toxins. In addition to our unique genetic scent, our apocrine glands give off pheromones— odorants tied to sexuality— that we detect with our vomeronasal system, which is thought to operate more or less independently of the olfactory system. It is contested whether the vomeronasal system is an organ that developed entirely separately of the olfactory epithelium, but it most definitely bypasses the cognitive centers of the brain and goes straight to survival behaviors and emotions in the limbic system.
In the infamous book Perfume by Patrick Süskind, the main character Grenouille has an extraordinary sense of smell, but gives off no odor himself. He determines that he can rule the world by developing a perfume from the harvested scent of pubescent virgins. Clever fellow! While much research is being performed on isolating pheromones, no one has yet been successful in synthesizing these mysterious aphrodisiacs. The International Flavors and Fragrances company conducted what must have been a tremendously extensive study, as they concluded that women who are exposed to a heavy dosage of male musk on a regular basis develop shorter menstrual cycles, ovulate more frequently, and conceive more easily.
Using odor in conception is nothing new. The sixth century Greek obstetrician Aetios of Amida wrote, “To test whether or not a woman will conceive, they resort to these means: burn resin under the lower garments so that vapor enters the genital passage. If the odor passes through the body and reaches the mouth and nostrils, she will conceive. Otherwise, she is sterile.”
Pheromones can become embedded in clothing, linens and furniture. Researchers conducted a study in which a single woman sported t-shirts throughout the month, sinking her pheromones into their cotton fibers. A couple of these t-shirts were then given to male test subjects to sniff, who were asked a trick question about whether they thought the woman wearing t-shirt “A” was more attractive than the woman wearing t-shirt “B.” Although it was the same woman, the men consistently reported that one t-shirt had a more beautiful wearer, and this t-shirt was the one the woman wore while ovulating.
Think about how the next time you deposit your clothes at a thrift store, you are also donating your pheromones. Perhaps you have experienced this if you bought something at a vintage shop or borrowed a friend’s shirt. It smelled clean enough when you pulled it off the rack, but once you warmed it up against your skin you found yourself giving off someone else’s distinctive odor that did not belong to you.
dumbo Washington & Front Streets, Brooklyn, NY
To whet the olfactory epithelium, we must perform the Smelling Committee Training Procedure. Allow your vision to release its grip on your attention, enabling you to cancel out undesired sensory information as you focus solely on what is flowing through your nostrils. This expedition is not for the timid at heart— there are odors offensive at every turn and scents that can be a struggle to sniff out. We will not be shying away from any of the nitty gritty.
Gently mingle with the bodies in the street, making sure you are always within the crowd, touching elbows and toes with others. Broadway is an excellent place to trace intimate, fleeting encounters with human and commercial odors. Draw your attention to your nose, deliberately—but not forcefully—taking in the air around you. An effective way to increase the potency of an odor is to pinch your nose for a while and then suddenly open your nostrils wide, allowing the shock of no smell to sudden bombardment of smell amplify the strength of the sensation.
Each one of us is born with a unique genetic scent, which we modify with perfumes, foods and our surrounding environs. Most of what comprises our “body odor” is secreted from our apocrine glands, located at the base of pubic hairs in the armpits, crotch, anus, chest and face, and mix with whatever bacteria and dirt we have hanging out there.
While we are often very familiar with our loved ones, it is only those infrequent occasions on a crowded subway car or cramming into an elevator that we get close enough to detect the odor of most strangers. To do so can be an uncomfortably intimate experience—even if the stranger doesn’t smell bad.
Odor artist Sissel Tolaas, who works for the Berlin outpost of the perfume giant International Flavors and Fragrances, recently exhibited at M.I.T. a series of “rub and sniff” wall paints embedded with the unique body sweats of several men and animals. Tolaas conducts her own social experiments with the odors, applying a leathery, oniony man sweat to her own body on outings to fancy parties, resulting in the utter confusion and disturbance of those around her.
Try to smell the microcosm of these other bodies around you. Can you identify brands of shampoo? Clothing fibers? The ingredients of a restricted diet on someone’s skin?
York Street F Train Jay & York Streets, Brooklyn, NY
While you often see mice and rats in the subway, how often can you smell them? Well, they can smell you. If they are stressed, rats will give off a special odor, perhaps the smell of fear. Other rats around them will smell the odor and their brains will give them a dose of pain relief, preparing them for the worst. Rats even know where you are by a few whiffs alone, because they can smell in stereo, and figure out which direction an odor is coming from. They have a Dolby experience of all the smells of your body, all these different bodies and underground musts and street sweeping from all over the city coming together into one, nebulous macrocosmic odor. Do you think there is a mathematical quotient of all of our individual body scents put together, or do you think there is a half life of unique odor that eventually degrades into a common human odor?
Gawker.com has compiled a map of subway smells. It is no surprise that many of these are vomit, mold and feces. The macrocosmic odor of the bowels of the city—literally—flood the subway tracks on a fairly regular basis. Most of the city’s sewage is routed underground to the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant in Queens, and the pipes busted a leak that flooded the G tracks with raw sewage. But even though sewage goes all the way to Newtown Creek from all over the city, 2.7 million gallons of it are dumped into the creek every year. It smells particularly bad in the heat.
Chambers Paper Fibers 135 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY
The first Smelling Committee was in search of unseen maladies. People in the 19th and early 20th centuries used to have to close their windows all summer due to the foul industrial stenches. John D. Rockefeller chose Newtown Creek as the site for his Standard Oil company in 1870. What was once a playground of wealthy mansions quickly transformed into a hotbed shuttling industry goods to and from the ocean along the railroad. There were oil refineries, sewage treatment plants and factories like the Cooper Glue Company (founder of the Cooper Union art and design school), which boiled the refuse of tanneries and slaughterhouses into glue and gelatin. Soon all kinds of industrial wastes were filling the creek, including a mixture of glue and putrefying bovines that formed what was known as Dead Animal Wharf. In the early 1900’s, the 3 ½ mile creek did almost as much business as the Mississippi River in pure tonnage. The Mississippi is 3,900 miles long.
The oil refineries have had a long-lasting effect on Brooklyn, Queens and the East River. Even as the waterfront is developed into lofts and condos, a glossy rainbow of oil slick and black goo is slowly expanding into the East River, underground and along the shoreline of Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Queens, stretching towards Manhattan and deeper into Brooklyn. Residents can smell gas in their pipes especially when it rains and the water molecules make the odor more apparent. The Newtown Creek is so toxic that fireman who swallowed some of the creek water while saving someone from drowning, died two days later.
One of the world’s largest oil spills occurred in the 1940s and 50s due to underground leaks. ExxonMobil is primarily held responsible for the17 million gallon oil spill, which encompasses 55 acres and growing. The spill was discovered about 30 years later in 1978. Although the spill is larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska and it’s in an urban area, clean-up only began in 1995 and has been painfully slow. Merely 8.5 million gallons of the toxic sludge have been removed.
There is a very active group of advocates and residents called Riverkeeper that monitors the creek, and recently won a lawsuit to have the State Attorney General prosecute the case, as well as have the EPA perform a study of the toxicity and effects of the spill. As a prime example of the entrepreneurial spirit and tradition of DIY Williamsburg, a fellow who learned about the spill and began drilling for oil. But he only got about 20 feet down before neighbors began complaining about the stench.
Brooklyn Bridge Park Main & Plymouth Streets, Brooklyn, NY
There are always some days of Collective Smelling Experiences in New York. Perhaps you were around in the fall of 2005 to be part of the Collective Maple Syrup Mystery? A sweet, permeating goodness deposited its odorants into the nostrils of people throughout Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. It smelled like maple syrup, or a buttery caramelized sugary sweetness. The Gothamist dubbed it “Eggoterrorism.” And no one could figure out what it was. The Department of Environmental Protection was out sniffing with no results. But beyond testing the air for certain volatile organic compounds, they had no better analytical tool than their own set of professional schnauzes. The scent of Aunt Jemima could only be mapped and analyzed the old-fashioned way: with the body.
Or perhaps you were among those who Collectively Flipped Out this January during the Smell of Fear incident, when a sulfuric smell like leaking gas permeated Manhattan, parts of Staten Island and New Jersey. The incident rekindled intensely emotional 9/11 panic among thousands of people, while the mayor tried to quell fear of a terrorist attack and ConEdison scrambled to find the source of a gas leak. When no leak was found, some suggested it was a spill of one of the many varieties of mercaptan, a stinky, harmless compound used to scent otherwise odorless natural gas. When the hunt for overflowing mercaptan proved fruitless, New York-New Jersey antagonism invigorated the desperate search for a source. The industrialized marshlands of Manhattan’s neighbor were soon blamed for the nauseating stench, to the Collective Infuration of New Jersey’s residents and officials.
While the Hindustan Times would probably never write an article about the distinctly acrid, foul smell of hot bog juice, torched outhouse and stinging Everclear released by the infected green and yellow mucous clouds of a routine Los Angeles smog alert, this New York miasma made news across the world and provided fresh comic material for celebrities. But once the odor had dissipated, the hunt was over and the paranoia dwindled.
For most anyway. But scientists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory continued to investigate, only to uncover evidence of the very realistic threat of pollution in New York’s waters. What the Eggoterrorism and Smell of Fear incidents both had in common were meteorological episodes called “inversion layers,” where a bubble of cold air drenched in stinky pollutants gets trapped beneath a layer of warm air, hovering and spreading low to the ground. The inversion layer combined with southern winds sweeping into Manhattan across particularly low tides at large marshlands like Jamaica Bay and Kill Van Kull. The rank breath of the waters is a result of excessive nutrient loading from sewage, fertilizers, chemical run-off and other pollutants that cannot be processed from the low oxygen levels of sparse plants and fish in a degraded and unsafe marine habitat. The Smell of Fear incident was thus yet another alert to our bodies of the threat of ourselves.
