The scent of the Wildflower Meadow in New York's Central Park--"toasted oats, honey, wood.." reminds author/illustrator Jason Logan of "my childhood." Photo credit: www.centralpark2000.com.
Summer in New York conjures up all sorts of fragrances. Sizzling garlic wafting from an open restaurant kitchen door. The baked, almost metallic smell of hot pavement. And my favorite, eau de fermenting garbage—especially pronounced during the garbage strike one interminable August.
In “Scents and the City” (The New York Times, Sunday, August 30, 2009, The Week in Review, p. 10), illustrator and author Jason Logan offers a whimsically odiferous map of the city, created after he trawled its streets and subways one sweltering weekend, sniffing his way from Fort George and the Cloisters—“subtle, incense-like burning cloves mixed with a dash of patchouli”—all the way down to White Hall: “Energy drink evaporating on sidewalk; waffles; sweat, nectarines…”
Logan has an amazing nose, not just for following “a delicate trail of flowers mingling with Indian curry around 34th street,” but also for pinpointing aromas that suggest the spirit of a place: Gallery smell: “Ceiling paint (matte), cardboard, air conditioning, and nothing else.” The subway: “smells like the Industrial Revolution,” money is “tangy, metallic-dusty, [like] Play-Doh.”
Urine is everywhere, but so are dog feces, coffee chain garbage and tourists.
What’s the worst smell Logan inhaled? A Harlem “crawl space between the oft-used machines that recycle beer and wine bottles: fermentation, apples, fear.” And the most sublime? The Wildflower Meadow in Central Park., redolent, among other things, of “toasted oats, honey, wood ….my childhood.”
If you go on-line, click the interactive map to read more about Logan’s aromatic odessey.