Liberals love New York City. They love the restaurants, the bars, the art, the museums. They also love the crime, the pollution, the homeless, the mentally ill, the tiny apartments, the panic rooms, the public urination, the noise, and the high cost of living. But living in New York also has one additional benefit: the smell.
On certain days in July and August, simply walking down a New York City block means being assaulted by smells: garbage, sweat, cigarettes, food carts and the hard-to-classify odors that come blasting on waves of hot air out of subway grates and building vents. How, we wondered, would a true expert describe the scents of summer in the city?One notoriously smelly block of Broome Street on the Lower East Side stopped them in their tracks. Ms. Barel at first said it smelled like wet dog. “Barnyard,” Ms. Lepeltier said, adding that she thought it might emanate from a poultry distributor in the neighborhood. As proof she pointed to some fuzz caught in a subway grate, which she thought might be feathers.The tour started in Chinatown, where the two women lingered over bins of dried fish. “It smells like what you give to birds, when you go to Petco,” Ms. Barel remarked.On Mott Street, they gagged at garbage smells and what Ms. Lepeltier pronounced was an odor that came from a rat.They stopped outside the Wyndham Garden Hotel, on Hester and Bowery, brought up short by a sweet smell."It’s floor cleaner, but with a very fruity smell," Ms. Barel said. "Very artificial, cheap."On a dank-smelling corner, Ms. Lepeltier said she detected fungus coming out of an air-conditioning unit.As the women climbed up to the High Line, another woman descended on the other side of the stairs carrying garbage bags, presumably filled with cans and bottles from restaurants, hung from the ends of a long stick that rested on her shoulder.“Warm beer,” Ms. Lepeltier remarked as she passed by. “You know, when you party too much, and you forget to clean up?”
For those (like me) who live in a nice suburban or rural neighborhood that doesn't smell, this may puzzle you. In crowded cities where residential, commercial, and industrial mix together, you get smells from everything. Also, because some people in cities are not toilet-trained, you get smells from that as well. To make it worse, everything in big cities is paved in cement, which doesn't absorb odors like lawns and dirt do.
Do you think the smell of New York is appropriate, given the political class that lives there?
This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.
No comments:
Post a Comment