Rotten in Elsinore Towers?
Of our five senses, smell is the most visceral.
Don’t invite the right-hand fellow to your next party!
Wired directly into our limbic system, it is the most evocative sense, the one we cannot block out (as anyone knows who’s spent too long with the wrong person in an elevator, airplane seat, or small office), and the direct route to pheromonic emotional results, including how lovers imprint on each other, and children on their parents.
Smell’s invisibility renders it both emotional and intimate.
“Even your best friends won’t tell you.”
Cities, meanwhile, are where strangers live together in the closest proximity, and apartments are the most dimensionally dense form of cohabitation. The result, as highlighted in this garlicky tale from the New York Times, is a silent but deadly war over smells:
SOMETIMES, vertical living really stinks.
Observe how readily scent-emotional metaphors come to mind.
Secondhand smells emanating from pets, cooking, cigarettes, renovations and even garbage can waft up, down and sideways among apartments (and occasionally town houses), sometimes hanging in one place — most objectionably, one’s own — like a stifling August afternoon.
Indeed, summer can be rankest of all: people are understandably reluctant to open their windows, while odors seem to cling to the humidity like sweat to the backseat of a taxi.
But many apartment dwellers believe — incorrectly, in many cases — that tainted air is an unavoidable price of living on top of one’s neighbors.
Value judgment, folks — just as hell is other people, pollution is other people’s aromas (no flatulence jokes please).
They hesitate over whether complaining to, or about, the perpetrator is an invasion of a neighbor’s privacy. Even when the issue is toxic secondhand smoke, affected neighbors are unsure whether they have the right — legally, neighborly or ethically — to insist on their own clean air.
Suzanne Steward and Seth Berkowitz live with smoke wafting up from two downstairs apartments.
Paging the aroma police!
Jacqueline A. Weiss, a lawyer who runs the
Our ‘nose-space’? My goodness, we are touchy. If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” does that reasoning likewise apply to the right to belch my fumes?
He had a big hooter, didn’t he?
Darren Sukenik, a senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, agreed. “It’s very common that in a 200-unit building, you’re going to have something smelling somewhere.”
Especially given the exquisite sensitivity of what my wife calls my quivering nostrils, everybody can always smell something somewhere.
Still, that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. “We don’t let our cats and dogs run around our halls,” he said. “Why should we let our veal chops?”
Are you saying we’re normally equivalent to that?”
Block that metaphor!
Aside from intra-elevator-bank spats, smells are one of the absolutely fundamental ways we distinguish those people from us normal Americans. We all know that those people live too many to a household. They cook with strange spices:
Among cooking aromas, Dr. Dalton said, the worst involve sulfur-rich vegetables like garlic, onions, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and asparagus. Also, she said, “fresh fish doesn’t smell, but when it is cooked, it contains chemical compounds giving it a characteristically fishy odor.”
And we’re not going to talk about the evacuatory aftermath of eating these foods, are we?
they don’t wash as we do, and goodness knows what exotic things they burn in their apartments. Why, it’s all a body can do simply to pass by their door, let alone step into their den.
“Goodness knows what it smells like there.”
I simply keep my nose in the air; what else can one do?
Managing agents and the lawyers who advise landlords, co-op and condominium boards report an increase in complaints about secondhand smoke, although noise complaints continue to trump nose-related ones.
In February, New York City’s 311 phone line began to track calls about secondhand smoke drifting among neighbors; the mayor’s office reports that the calls average 96 a month.
Not a huge number for a naked city of eight million aromas.
The smokers are coming! The smokers are coming!
But the 311 line will not refer the aggrieved to an agency, because the city doesn’t regulate smoking at home.
Smokers have become the modern pariahs, having been hounded from airplanes, offices, restaurants, and now hotel rooms. I’ll bet that an enterprising class-action attorney somewhere is even now buffing up an ‘odorous battery’ complaint for those who, from the secrecy of their own apartments, inflict secondhand smoke on neighbors, old people, and … children.
And unless you are willing to wear an activated-charcoal respirator, “there’s no single magic bullet for any odor,” said Pamela Dalton, a research scientist with Monell Chemical Senses Center in
But because the nose can so quickly become used to odors — older noses work less adeptly — the perpetrator may not know that he or she may be causing a stink. (Consider this unnerving fact: about 75% of the so-called musty odor that greets you upon returning from vacation is what visitors always smell, Dr. Dalton said.)
“O my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.”
As anyone knows who’s ever by mistake checked into a smoking rather than non-smoking hotel room (or dug a dead squirrel out of a chimney), penetrating smells linger for days if not weeks. This is especially true of porous or absorbent apartment surfaces like sheetrock, carpeting, and plastered ceilings:
As for which secondhand odors downgrade an apartment’s appeal the most, “cigarette smoke is the kiss of death,” said June Iseman, a vice president and broker at Stribling & Associates.
Mr. Sukenik of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said, “Cigarette smoking and cats are big.”
(Scientifically speaking, Dr. Dalton said, cat urine is more offensive than dog urine because of the greater amount of sulfur, which is “easily airborne, very volatile, and humans have an incredibly good sensitivity for detecting.”)
Let’s make sure he doesn’t read that, shall we?
Hide it how you will, the foul reek of your existence will seep out:
Smells frequently snake through hallways. An elevator shaft can act as the Typhoid Mary of unpleasant aromas, sucking them up and distributing them throughout the building’s byways, for instance, or a fish-frying neighbor may prop open a front door.
Breathing in those little skulls and breathing them out wherever.
“Sealing the door works pretty well,” said Mr. Martinez, so long as the door is closed. A type of weather-stripping installed by a carpenter can be aesthetically discreet and make it close to airtight.
If it cannot be eliminated, perhaps scent can be disguised:
Red flags [in visiting an apartment] include “anything that’s an attempt to mask an odor, whether it’s those electric fans that send out scented oil, or potpourri or fancy candles actually lit and burning,” said Julie Friedman, a senior associate broker with Bellmarc Realty.
Another clue that something fishy’s going on:
Access restricted to a certain time of day is another cue, she said, recalling the Upper East Side co-op that allowed her clients to visit only at midmorning and then again in the late afternoon.
“It turned out the broker was working around the fish schedule” of the fishmonger downstairs that was accepting its deliveries and preparing foods when prospective buyers were banned, Ms. Friedman said.
And if you find something rotten in
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …
Best recover your security deposit on that palace.”
