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DUMBO Tour, Location 7

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.

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Smelling Committee

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brooklyn , subway , smell , rats , underground , art , new york , stinky , odor , smelling committee , dumbo , earthy