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DUMBO Tour, Location 9

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.

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Smelling Committee

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brooklyn , smell , park , art , water , new york , fresh air , odor , smelling committee , dumbo