America's Most Olfactory City

When driving to New Orleans, you begin to smell the base note many miles away. It’s the smell of Swamp. A millennium's worth of muck. Eons of decay.

Does this photo make you recoil? Chances are you won’t like New Orleans.

I used to say that this city wasn’t really part of America, and I still say that. Certainly it wasn’t treated as part of America -- CleanAmerica -- after Katrina, which the Gulf Coast people simply call “The Storm,” as if there hadn’t been and will never be another one like it. It was as though the Powers of the time simply cut the city loose, hoping it would drift out into the Gulf, with its polyglot population, its aura of decadence, its social problems, its reputation as a place one goes to do things one doesn’t do at home; hoping that it would simply sink from their view. But it didn’t. It’s not the same -- will never be -- but it’s still here.

I’ve always loved the place. I’ve been there many times. But it’s not for everyone. If you like tidy, cleaned-up, charming historic districts, try Charleston. Because New Orleans isn’t tidy in any way.

We only had one night and day, this time. Not long. Just long enough to walk a bit, ten blocks here, four there; dinner uptown, one night at my favorite slightly-tattered, musty old hotel -- once a hospital during the Civil War, now reputed to be haunted -- on Chartres Street.

Truth be told, many of the smells of New Orleans aren’t nice.

Old cities, old sewers; it hangs in the air, sweetish and sour, the odor of humanity. It’s always there. You smell it as soon as you get out of the car. There’s garbage, too; piles of it, waiting for the plow, and manure from the horses that pull buggies filled with tourists around the Vieux Carre.

We walked ten blocks or so down Chartres, to a place I had heard had good muffaletas (Italian bread soaked with “olive salad,” or marinated green olives, onions, peppers and garlic, then filled with sliced Italian deli meats -- salami, ham -- and provolone cheese. They’re essential here.) It was around noon. We were famished, and that walk was filled with the steamy smell of seafood boil -- spices, like white pepper, cayenne and thyme, added to cooking water -- and crabs simmering in it. That scent poured out of the restaurants and stands as the city got ready for its (long) lunch break. I could smell shrimp and oysters frying, too. That seafood smell mixes with the swamp and river and the sewers and the garbage, and it is that which is, for me, the quintessential smell of the old Quarter.

Since I began exploring the olfactory world through perfumery, odors that used to bother me don’t any more. Human body odor, for example. There’s lots of that in the Vieux Carre -- street performers, many of them shockingly young, who clearly don’t get to bathe enough, and hawkers, and frat boys on Bourbon Street benders. It’s the smell of living. Lots of that here.

For me, the first extra-spicy Bloody Mary and the first cup of gumbo makes me feel at home. Gumbo is New Orleans in a bowl. I’ve heard that many places almost never start it from scratch. They just keep adding to the pot, which never has a chance to get cold. There’s the dark roux, a paste of flour and oil which must be cooked only to a specific point, or it’ll “break” -- separate. Then comes the “trinity” of Creole cooking, onion, celery and green pepper simmered only until limp. Then stock, all kinds, seafood, chicken, fish; okra, to thicken it, and sometimes the cayenne-hot Andouille sausage. Then, the cook adds whatever makes it his, or hers -- spices, crawfish, shrimp, chicken, oysters, sausage, you name it, and it simmers for hours. The resulting brew is thick and dark as mud. And then it is finished with file powder, made from ground sassafras leaves, added only at the last moment, and only to the individual bowl, as direct heat makes it “ropy.” I smelled the file this time like I never have before. A little pine, a little citrus, a little camphor. A perfume.

There are two perfumeries in the Vieux Carre, both old and historic. (I can’t think of any place on earth where perfumes would have been more necessary than here.) They are Hove and Bourbon French, and, since it was Sunday, both were closed. I’d planned to visit them on Monday, but a storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the schools were closing, and we decided we’d better get out.

Next time.

Not to worry. There will be many next times. And the perfumeries, like New Orleans, will still be there.

Photo copyright Denidini. Used under license from Dreamstime.com

Sights and Smells: Venice Beach, California

For photos illustrating this post, go here.


When I began going to Venice Beach some time in the mid-Seventies, it was struggling against the ruins of 60’s peace ‘n’ love; druggy, dirty, dangerous and filled with vagrants. Every vestibule reeked of stale urine, and was often occupied by someone living in a cardboard box. Paint peeled off the buildings in sheets and sometimes windows fell out of their casements. Trash blew along the boardwalk like tumbleweeds. Coming out of a tavern off the pier once, I saw a coyote trotting down Washington. He was retaking an old territory.

But there was a vitality and realness to it all. There were still artists’ studios on Market Street then. There was the restaurant without a name near Pacific and Windward, immortalized by the Doors song “Soul Kitchen,” where you could get really good food -- breakfast or meat & three -- for a couple of dollars. We were eating there the day I saw my first corpse. The coroner’s van pulled up in front of an old bungalow across the street, and presently they brought out the body of a fortyish man, bearded and cyanotic, not bothering to cover him. We shrugged and went on eating our eggs -- some junkie’s death -- but I never forgot it.

I didn’t actually go to the beach in those days, just hung around the boardwalk area, taking hundreds of photographs which I can’t find now, drinking coffee at the Sidewalk Cafe, or just walking around. It wasn’t until later, during the ’84 Olympics, that I actually lay on the beach with towel and sunscreen. It became The Thing to Do during those two weeks, because so many foreign women sunbathed topless, as at home, and the American girls followed suit. If the cops rousted you, you simply pretended that you didn’t speak English and didn’t understand them. Pretty soon, they gave up.

Anyway, we went down to Venice on a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago. It’s been about twenty years for me.

It is, thankfully, still tattered. But it seems that the whole place has become a sort of show. I’m not sure who the target audience is, but I suspect that it might be me.

As I looked around, I realized that just about everyone promenading up and down the boardwalk was some sort of mark. The bands were playing for them; the guy who snaps a mousetrap onto his tongue was performing for them. Even the “kick me” guy was there for them, I mean...us.

It’s not as though there weren’t street performers years ago, or trinkets vendors, or freaks. It’s just that these were professional freaks. People who made their livings as freaks. And I, once a participant, had become an observer.

One thing hadn’t changed much: the smells. Clouds of incense, rolling out of stores and vans. Patchouli oil-scented skin. Pot. A group of guys walked ahead of us, smoking a blunt, right out on the street, and why not? (It’s practically legal -- there’s even a storefront doctor’s office where one can procure, or so I’m told, a pot prescription, for any number of vague ailments.) Sunscreen. Stale urine -- ah, Venice! -- and overflowing trash bins. Dreadlocked hair. B.O. in every strength and variety. County-fair food from the stalls and restaurants.

Even blind, I would have known exactly where I was.

With eyes wide open, though, I could see that they’ve extended the vending area out onto the sand, and that these new vendors have tents like at art fairs. I could see a sign advertising an apartment Jim Morrison had once lived in (step right up!) as a tourist attraction. A sign advertising the “Venice Freak Show.” Another sign that said “Venice Beach parking $20.”

Not much was the same. Some of the street performers. And the smells.

I think that we use scents as references because, in a way, we have to. The visuals change so quickly now, faster and faster. It is scent that slows down time, reminds us in that incomparably visceral way that we’re still here, that the past did exist, that it's there to be called upon, and it’s free.



Photos by KM Borow, all rights reserved.

Smellscapes: A Whiff of Corruption

“Ipoh, the first major stop on the Kuala Lumpur run, has a station hotel, a late-Victorian Gormenghast with long windows covered by somber curtains. The brown drapery hangs in thick folds, keeping out the breeze and preserving the heat, which is paddled around the dining room by ten slow fans. All the tables are set, and the waiter, who might be dead, is propped against the wall at the far side of the room. It is fairly certain there is a suicide upstairs waiting to be discovered, and the flies that soar through the high-ceilinged bar are making for the corpse of this ruined planter or disgraced towkay. It is the sort of hotel that has a skeleton in every closet and a register thick with the pseudonyms of adulterers. I once walked into the station hotel at Ipoh with my little boy, and as soon as we crossed the threshold he began to cry. His innocent nose had smelled what mine couldn’t, and I rushed away with him, relieved, savoring the well-being of deliverance.”

-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar, 1975


This passage is from Theroux’s classic book about real travel. It's about a trip he took, by rail, from London to, well, London, by way of the Near East, India, Asia and Russia. “After all,” he says at the end, “the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.”