Facebook X Email Print Save Story Not long ago, the residents of Gowanus, in Brooklyn, began to notice that the smell of their canal, known for its unpleasant odor since the Gilded Age, had reached a new level of pungency. An ongoing Superfund cleanup, begun in 2020, along with the hubbub of development projects and the raw sewage that flows into the canal whenever it rains, had stirred up an unpredictable blend of contaminants. Ridding the waterway of its stinky pollutants is a years-long process.
For now, the city has a temporary fix: perfumery. The Department of Environmental Protection, with the help of what it calls an “odor-neutralizing misting system,” has been pumping citrus and “Christmas” scents near the canal—a civic version of the powder-room staple Poo-Pourri. Is it working? Maybe not.
The Christmas scent drew complaints for its cloying cinnamon notes. Frustrations boiled over last month at a virtual meeting of the Gowanus Advisory Board. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for fifty years,” one resident told the board.
“I’ve smelt bad . But I have never smelled the canal as bad as it is now.” On a recent afternoon, Raymond Matts, a fragrance designer (or “nose”) who once led various perfume departments at Estée Lauder and Elizabeth Arden, travelled to the canal’s banks to assess the situation.
From the Whole Foods parking lot, Matts got his first whiff of eau de Gowanus: he discerned a note of oak moss, similar to the base he’d used for Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume, in 1991. His nostrils twitched. “I’m getting a sulfuric, like when you smell matchsticks after they’ve been lit,” he said.
“You’ll find this in some amber notes we use.” It was ninety degrees, low tide—what locals call the “ripe time.” Matts, a trim sixty-two-year-old resident of the Upper East Side, wore hiking pants and a fitted T-shirt.
He had never been to Gowanus. As he crossed the Third Street Bridge, he gazed down at the gunmetal-gray water, dappled with rainbow flecks like the sparkles created by a disco ball. “There really is a symphony of odors,” he said.
He picked up a “metallic,” followed by an “animalic note,” which made him think of castoreum, a milky substance that’s found in the anal gland of beavers and used in chypre perfumes. “The fresher smell is fishy, then underneath that you get flashes of suède,” he continued. “It’s giving depth to that fresh aspect of it.
” The dead end of Bond Street brought another aroma. “It’s almost like tar. But the fresher part of tar,” he said, sniffing, unaware that he was standing on a brownfield, where, for a century, viscous coal tars had leeched into the soil beneath a former gas plant.
It reminded him that he had once slipped a butyric note—reminiscent of vomit—into the recipe for Clinique’s Happy, a best-seller. “It’s typical of what we do in perfumery,” he said. “Some of the ugliest things we create beauty out of.
” On a new esplanade overlooking the canal, an odor review was solicited from a shirtless man in his thirties, a resident of an adjacent luxury condo. “Sometimes it has that ‘I feel like I’m going to throw up and can’t breathe’ smell,” he said. He added that he had not expected such a potent odor when he moved in two years ago; the sales pitch had promised a “picturesque waterfront park.
” Above the Union Street Bridge, the marine notes Matts had identified before gave way to something sharper. “Putrid suède and, like, a dead animal that’s been in the walls,” Matts said. He also detected horse manure.
His eyes appeared to be watering. In search of relief and shade, Matts wandered into a mechanic’s garage. A man inside, Louis Jager, said that he used to work as a chemical compounder for Technology Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.
He’d been around strong odors all his life. But, after thirty-plus years in Gowanus, he was more or less accustomed to the stink. “When you don’t smell it anymore, that means it’s a part of you,” he said.
“Nasal fatigue,” Matts said, using the technical term. He took a few final sniffs, then walked off toward the F train. A couple of days later, John Prince, who is overseeing the Superfund program, agreed to look at Matts’s findings.
The coal tar Matts had sniffed likely contained naphthalene, a toxic compound found in mothballs. The sulfur came from belched-up sewer gas, or the breakdown of industrial contaminants and seaweed. As for the metallics, the canal is full of residual copper, mercury, lead, and arsenic.
The dead-animal smell was a no-brainer: carcasses are found in the canal all the time, although, as far as Prince knew, it’d been a while since anyone pulled up a horse. ♦ New Yorker Favorites An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology . Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon .
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