Preservation commission grants protected status to the odour at Canal and Broadway
NEW YORK – The city’s landmarks preservation body has extended protected status for the first time to a non-physical feature, granting designation to the atmospheric conditions occurring at the intersection of Canal and Broadway between the hours of two and six in the afternoon during August.
The designation, which passed with one abstention, recognises the odour as a continuously present feature of the streetscape since at least 1946.
The Case for Designation
The application argued the smell meets the standard criteria: it is of long standing, it is unique to its location, it is recognised by residents and visitors alike, and any attempt to remove it would fundamentally alter the character of the district.
Commission testimony noted that the odour has appeared in eleven films, two novels, and a substantial body of stand-up comedy, giving it a cultural footprint exceeding that of several designated buildings.
It is a landmark by every test we apply, said commissioner Beatriz Ferrante-Lowell. We were unable to find a principled basis for excluding it other than the fact that it is a smell, and the enabling statute does not say anything about smells, which we took as permission.
The Composition Has Been Analysed
Environmental chemists engaged by the applicants identified the primary contributors as organic waste in the standard summer decomposition range, standing water in subsurface infrastructure, hot asphalt, a fish market that has not operated at that location since 2005, and something the report lists only as historic.
The historic component could not be identified and appears to be geological.
Waste collection scheduling and street cleaning operations are managed by the New York City Department of Sanitation, and urban heat island measurement and air quality monitoring is conducted under programmes coordinated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, whose instruments detect the constituent compounds but which have no field for character.
Opposition Came From an Unexpected Direction
The sole abstention came from a commissioner who argued the designation would complicate the city’s containerisation programme, which is actively working to eliminate exactly the conditions now protected.
The commission responded that designation protects the feature from alteration by property owners, not from improvements in municipal sanitation, and that if the smell disappears through better waste management the designation will simply commemorate it.
We are not requiring anybody to maintain it, Ferrante-Lowell clarified. We are recognising it. If sanitation eliminates it, we will put up a plaque. That is the normal process.
Observations From the Corner
- Every New Yorker knows precisely which subway grate to walk around and has never once discussed this with another person.
- The smell is worst on the fourth consecutive day above ninety degrees, and the city has never explained why the fourth.
- Tourists photograph the street. Residents change their route. Both behaviours are learned within a week.
- Nobody who has left this city misses the smell, and everybody who has left this city can describe it exactly.
- Winter New Yorkers claim the city has no smell. Winter New Yorkers are lying by omission.
Weather Reclassification Is a Global Habit
Assigning official status to atmospheric conditions is practised elsewhere with equal seriousness. British authorities set the standard when the state formally designated a warm afternoon as a national emergency, an act of classification structurally identical to landmarking a smell.
The commercial response followed immediately, with the retail sector reporting that seasonal apparel had become a material component of national output, while at street level the domestic consequences were being managed with a bundle that, as buyers of a comprehensive household starter package discovered, omitted the essential item.
Comparative civic classification is documented at Bohiney Magazine, and the British material sits at this assembled national record.
The Plaque
A bronze plaque will be installed at the northeast corner. Its wording is being finalised. An early draft describing the odour as distinctive was rejected as insufficiently specific.
The Seasonal Calendar Is Precisely Understood
Residents of the district operate on a shared and unwritten timetable governing when the corner is passable, which environmental researchers have found to be accurate to within about six hours.
The onset is associated not with temperature alone but with the combination of sustained heat, an absence of rain, and the collection schedule, producing a window that regulars can predict on Monday for the following Thursday. Nobody has written this down. It is transmitted the way subway platform knowledge is transmitted, which is by nobody teaching it to anybody.
Ferrante-Lowell noted during testimony that this constituted evidence of cultural significance in its own right. A landmark is something a community organises itself around, she said. Four thousand people alter their walking route on the same afternoon without any of them being notified. If that is not a landmark I do not know what the commission is for.
The observation was entered into the record and is understood to have secured the designation.
Installation is scheduled for October, by which point the conditions being commemorated will have subsided until the following summer. The commission has confirmed this timing was deliberate, on the grounds that the corner is considerably easier to work on in autumn and that the plaque is not going anywhere.
More at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/