The New York Times has a “Scents of the City” smell map online. It’s an interesting combination of day and night smells for different neighborhoods, specifically highlighting the smells of Summer. Smell mapping isn’t anything new, in fact there’s a whole Japanese website devoted specifically to capturing and describing smells. Smell is an important memory trigger, and this is a fun an interesting site.
I used to live in NYC, and the smell description of “Strong Almost Anywhere” sounds about right to me: pretzels; coffee chain garbage; cigarettes; fried stuff; tourists; urine. Although that may be so, I still treasure the memories of my summers there.
