by Caitlin Berrigan

tags:  navigation  expedition  ecology 

In 1891… “Irritated by the foul stenches that wafted through their northeast Brooklyn neighborhood, members of the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee embarked on a boat trip up Newtown Creek in September… in search of the responsible parties. They reached a point across from the oil refineries where ‘the stenches began asserting themselves with all the vigor of fully developed stenches.’ What the Smelling Committee quickly discovered was that an unusually heavy concentration of industrial activity… had transformed the area around Newtown Creek into an ecological wasteland.” - Andrew Hurley (1994)

The Smelling Committee

One-hundred and fifteen years later this September, as part of the Conflux Festival a new olfactory event will unravel in Williamsburg. Inspired by the olfactory bravado of the original Smelling Committee, we will lead an historical simulacrum of the 1891 adventure that will invite reflection upon the ephemeral, odiferous fabric of Brooklyn neighborhoods. We use our eyes to navigate geographies, but it is our sense of smell that ties us most tautly to our emotional memories. Histories of New York are ripe with scents and stinks—the trek of the Smelling Committee will attempt to chart a small portion of this heritage as a collective endeavor.

Starting at the McCaig-Welles Gallery at 129 Roebling Street on Friday, September 15th at 2pm, participants are invited to join the ranks of the Smelling Committee and embark upon an olfactory mapping of a small corner of Brooklyn. The Committee leaders will distribute badges to all participants. Markers and maps of the route will also be supplied for the purpose of recording which odors were encountered where upon the trek. Everyone will be invited to notify the group of any particularly interesting smells, and the leaders will point out locations of relevance to the Committee.

Perhaps patterns will emerge of culture, pollution, cuisine, disarray, weeds and refuse—developing a new natural history of the stench and fragrance of 21st century Brooklyn.

Mapping odor in the brain

Last fall witnessed unsolved mystery reports of a sweet, permeating goodness depositing its odorants into the nostrils of hundreds of shocked residents throughout Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. It smelled like maple syrup, waffles, buttery caramelized sugary sweetness crisping at the edges of October and November. The blog Gothamist.com dubbed it “Eggoterrorism.” And no one could figure out what it was. Or why it was emanating across expansive borough lines in a city famous for its complexities of stink.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection was out on the task, sampling and sniffing with no results. But beyond testing the air for certain volatile organic compounds, like the sweet-smelling toxin benzoic acid, the DEP had no better analytical tool than their own set of professional schnauzes. GPS-mapping, RFID-tagging and satellite surveillance be damned to their computerized purgatories— the scent of Aunt Jemima could only be mapped and analyzed the old-fashioned way: with the body.

Such difficulty analyzing smells comes as little surprise, since odors are subtle and ephemeral substances requiring a complex olfactory system to detect, analyze and assign associations. Approximately 1,000 genes encode 1,000 different odor receptors (each representing thousands of sensory neurons to which odorants attach), making this the largest known gene family in mammals. The receptors permit us to distinguish 10,000 scents, whereas just three receptors on the human retina allow us to distinguish several hundred hues. And unlike other sensory neurons, olfactory neurons are regenerated throughout life. These odor receptors emit electric signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain, just a few centimeters from the nose, where it is theorized that a complex spatial mapping of the different triggered receptors permits the brain to identify and remember a scent.

Oft’ maligned as the humanoid’s inferior sense in this optically-obsessive society, smell is a critical component in relating to the external world— even if we can’t really smell in stereo like rats. Common folklore surrounding the link between odor and memory prompted neuroscientists to coin the term the “Proust Phenomenon,” after the smell of the author’s famous tea-logged biscuit that sent him on a multi-tomed trek into his own forgotten memories. Yet recent research in neurological mapping has shown that while odor may not be a stronger trigger of memory than verbal or visual stimuli, it arouses a far more emotional response.

Smell is unique among all other sensory systems in its ability to directly access the amygdala, an emotional center of the brain. Memories from early childhood are more likely to be elicited by odors, whereas memories of early adulthood are triggered more often by visuals. Moreover, pleasant smells activate different areas of the brain than neutral and gross smells— also different from areas of the brain activated by sex pheromones.

Each and every one of us has our own unique genetic scent, modified by hormonal changes, French fries, garlic sauce and oral hygiene. We sniff each other in social interactions while our vomeronasal organ— supposedly distinct from the olfactory epithelium that takes care of ordinary smells— sniffs the sex pheromones emitted by musky dudes and ovulating women, bypasses the cognitive areas of the brain and goes straight to behavioral response. This prompted author Patrick Süskind’s creepy fictional character Grenouille in Das Parfum to determine that he could rule the world by developing a perfume from the harvested scent of pubescent virgins:

“Together with breath [scent] entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”

Having mapped topographies and neural pathways and our lovers’ bodies, we wondered: what might a collective map of our odiferous environment look like? How might it change over time, from seasons to years, through mysterious maple syrup episodes, wet autumn leaves, hot rubber in the summer, industry and gentrification? And what are the emotional stories triggered by those scents? New York is a fertile odiferous nebula with legendary smells— and very little attention paid to them in historic record or the public conscience.

What is the smell of industry?

The idea for the Smelling Committee unraveled when we were researching the explosive reaches of oil refineries in New York City. Newtown Creek, forming the border between Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Queens, has been home to oil refineries, glue manufacturers, cement factories, and sewage treatment plants for the last three centuries. The brown belch of 2.7 billion gallons of the city’s raw sewage dumped annually in the creek continues to sicken Queens residents and G-line straphangers, as did the boiled bodies of putrefying animals that served as ingredients for glue in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The miasmic potential of the creek’s industries was rudely discovered by the Smelling Committee of 1891, when the “fully-developed stenches” of the polluting oil refineries finally reached the doorsteps of Brooklyn residents. Foul whiffs that stimulate environmental change are not uncommon, because a lot more is at stake than an unpleasant sniff. Such magnitude of bad odor is a primal and emotional indicator that something is horribly wrong.

Newtown Creek is a publicly navigable body of water, and a trip upriver will reveal to any intrepid boater a glossy rainbow of oil slick and black goo slowly expanding into the East River, underground and along the shoreline of Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Queens. One of the world’s largest oil spills occurred in the 1940s and 50s due to a series of underground leaks along the waters of the creek. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil through a series of corporate mergers) was primarily responsible for the estimated 17 million gallon oil spill, encompassing 55 acres and growing. The spill was discovered about 30 years later in 1978. Although the spill is larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska and it is in a densely-populated area, clean-up of the oil spill only began in 1995 and has been slower than molasses in winter. Merely 8.5 million gallons of the toxic sludge have been removed.

The city’s 2012 Olympic Park reveries, like a threatened visit from the in-laws, brought the beguiling promises of politicians to finally clean up the creek. The promises evaporated after the bid was refused and the city’s dejectedness set in, but a dogged group of citizens and Riverkeeper, a community watershed advocacy group, had already been on the Sisyphean ball for years. They were rewarded in June, when the industry-friendly Department of Environmental Conservation turned the case over at last to State Attorney General Spitzer for aggressive prosecution. Several days later, Congress approved an independent EPA study of the spill, which awaits approval by our beloved president.

While the Smelling Committee of 2006 will not be boating upriver, we will be honoring the importance of our most emotional sensory system and its relation to culture, the environment, pleasure, hunger, disgust and urban investigation.

Sources “Greenpoint, Maspeth Residents Lobby To Get 55-Year-Old Oil Spill Cleaned Up.” R. Berman, New York Sun, November 18, 2005.
“Gioia Joins Oil Spill Lawsuit.” D. Bertrand, New York Daily News, November 18, 2005.
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“PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK Pollution could put olympics up a creek.” M. O’Keeffe, New York Daily News, February 27, 2005.
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Links:
greenapplemap.org/page/sep-erashop
www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2004/water/water_creek.html
http://www.riverkeeper.org
www.wayfaring.com/maps/show/1837