The city's smellscape

Riding around in a car there's a curtain of glass and steel separating you from the sounds, sights and smells of the streets. Roll the windows down if you want to, but there’s still no way that you’re going to get the kind of intimate experience of the city that you would get on the back of a pedicab. Lest this sound like some clumsy pedicab propaganda piece, let me hasten to say that the street-level intimacy I’m talking about is not necessarily pleasant. Sometimes it's pure bliss, but not always.

I mentioned sounds, sights and smells, so let's begin by considering a couple of examples from the auditory realm. Having nothing between you and the melodies of the musicians on Royal Street may be nice. On the other hand there’s that car with the shock and awe stereo system blasting out something that resembles the sound of a jackhammer, only less melodic and about a hundred decibels louder. That will make you wish fervently for some windows to roll up.

What about the city's sights? You may well appreciate the improved opportunities for admiring the Spanish colonial architecture from the passenger seat of the pedicab; but sit in that same seat for long, and you'll start to feel like you’re on an urban safari in which Rattus norvegicus (the common rat) is not early as rare and elusive as we all might wish.  (Early on in my pedicab career I saw a rat darting between a drain and a dumpster, and without thinking I blurted out: “Wow, look at that rat!” to which one of my riders responded: “Umm… I don’t think that’s the tour we paid for.”)

Then there’s the olfactory experience, to which the remainder of this post will be devoted.

On the plus side there's the warm, sweet fragrance of frying beignets at Cafe du Monde.

In the minus column, there are those piles of manure left behind by the carriage mules and police horses. (Read here about the controversy this has been creating lately.) In the interest of full disclosure, I've been working lately as a buggy driver in addition to the pedicab gig. The company I work for, Royal Carriages, recently had an hour-and-half meeting to discuss creative solutions to the mule poo problem. (Our mules wear "diapers", but they're not entirely effective. Of course, the horses used by the mounted police don't wear diapers.)

Back to French Quarter fragrances: The block of St. Phillip between Chartres and Decatur is especially nice. At the Chartres end, there's the enticing smell of Creole/Italian cooking coming from Irene's; at the Decatur end, there's the French Market Restaurant with its exquisite, spicy and distinctly New Orleans boiled-seafood aroma. I think they're pumping it out to the street on purpose. No doubt New Orleans has much better restaurants, but as far as I'm concerned, 1001 Decatur might just be the sweetest smelling spot in the city.

When it comes to picking the Quarter's stinkiest spot, I don't think that there would be much controversy in the pedicabbie community. The stench of vomit is common up and down Bourbon, but the corner of Bourbon and Iberville is the foulest by far. Not just the corner actually, but that whole right-angle stretch from Canal and Bourbon to Bourbon and Iberville to Iberville and Royal. I'm not sure what it is that makes that bit so bad. It must have something to do with the cluster of oyster houses there. If you think about it, they have to be discarding gillions of oyster shells, and all those juices are dripping out of the dumpsters and draining right into the streets.  

It was a fellow pedicabbie who suggested that I devote a post to the smells of the city, so I decided that it would be a good idea to solicit input from my colleagues for this piece. I put the word out on the our Facebook page, and I got an enthusiastic response, the highlights of which I now pass on to you my readers. (The quotes are in italics. My comments are in plain text.)

• You can't forget about marijuana. There have been a couple of occasions in which I have become aware that someone was smoking pot on the back of my bike. Strangely enough I didn't smell it those times. I'm guessing that the smoke just drifted along behind us like exhaust from a car. But whenever I ride past someone who's toking on the side of the street the acrid odor is unmistakable.
• The jerk chicken man on Frenchmen St. This is a Jamaican dude with a barbecue grill. I bought his chicken once. It was OK, but definitely one of those things that doesn't taste nearly as good as it smells.
• You can smell those crust punks from 50 feet away sometimes. Three different people mentioned the body odor of crust punks.
• You can't leave out the sweet olive trees and confederate jasmine during springtime. 
• Piss-covered, passed-out frat boy with a hint of sugary Hand Grenade vomit. 
• Coffee roasting at the P&G plant in the Marigny that wafts over to us in the Quarter sometimes.
• Standard coffee and Aunt Sally's in the Marigny. Candy and coffee. Are there any better smells?

One colleague was so inspired by this whole discussion that he proposed a scratch-and-sniff map of New Orleans. Sounds like a great idea! I wonder how you would go about capturing the essence of crust punk body odor for a scratch-and-sniff map.