The night air all over Manhattan was brisk, with a hint of winter
and a dash of something sweetly out of the ordinary. Some thought it
smelled like maple syrup. Some said caramel, or a freshly baked pie, or
Bit-O-Honey candy bars.
From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in
Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island, the question was the same on
Thursday night and into early yesterday: What was that smell?
The aroma not only revived memories of childhood, but in a city
scared by terrorism, it raised vague worries about an attack deviously
cloaked in the smell of grandma's kitchen.
It was so seductive that many New Yorkers found themselves behaving
strangely, succumbing to urges usually kept under wraps. One woman who
never touches the stuff said she was inspired to eat ice cream.
Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through
the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city's 311
emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the
smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and
mysteriously, as it had appeared.
Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.
The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower
Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the
other boroughs - so quickly that officials expressed concern. The
city's Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police
and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and
New Jersey,
and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and
container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected
there.
Raymond W. Kelly,
the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday
that tests and air monitoring had revealed "nothing of a hazardous
nature."
"It's believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can't
substantiate that at this time," Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the
source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan.
The chase led the city's environmental bloodhounds to some
interesting places. Investigators working on a tip checked the Jacques
Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo, but the owner insisted he had not been
the culprit. His staff had spent the afternoon roasting almonds, he
said. And anyway, chocolate, for those who really know, smells bitter,
not sweet.
"Perhaps if it was a chocolate smell, people would be running here
today," Mr. Torres said from his shop, which he said was no busier than
normal for a Friday in autumn. His chef, Susana Garcia, 31, who was on
duty Thursday, said the mysterious odor was definitely more like maple
syrup than like chocolate. It was, Mr. Torres said, a kind of
warm-your-heart holiday smell appropriate for this time of year.
If there was anyone in New York who could recognize the aroma of
maple syrup, it would be a Canadian like Jeff Breithaupt, 42, cultural
affairs officer at the Canadian Consulate in New York. He said he was
out running on the Upper East Side last night when the smell came to
him. Right away, he thought it was caramel candy.
A labor organizer, Rekha Eanni, said she could not characterize the
exact smell, but after getting out of a night class at New York
University she was overcome with a craving for pumpkin pie. When she
got home there was no pie, so she did something she never does.
"I made myself a pretty big bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cornflakes," she said.
Experts say that no human sense is more directly connected to the
emotions than the sense of smell. "Before we know we are even in
contact with a smell we have already received it and reacted to it," a
professional perfumer, Mandy Aftel, said. "Smells come in without
language and go directly to the emotional center of the brain. That's
why they are so connected to memory."
As soon as he smelled the mystery smell, Greg Nickson, 45, a
freelance cameraman, was transported, like Marcel Proust, to things
past, things like the chocolate factory that flooded his childhood
neighborhood in Chicago with sweet aromas.
When he poked his head out of his 10th-floor apartment window to
look for his wife, Mr. Nickson got a good whiff of it, and it puzzled
him.
"I thought," he said. " 'How could the smell be so pervasive?' "
With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the
city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low
to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work
its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an
associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.
When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.
With the mayor enjoying a sizable lead in polls about the upcoming
election, someone asked whether it struck him as, perhaps, the sweet
smell of success.
He gave an enigmatic answer. "Nature," the mayor said, "should be allowed to take care of its own."
Kareem Fahim and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.
