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New York is an especially odoriferous place in August with the sun beating down on pretty much every odd thing that makes its way onto the city streets. As we enter the hottest stretch of the year, you’ll most likely encounter a majority of these smells while going about your day. Think of them as accents scents of Eau de NYC.
1. Garbage
The signature scent of many New York intersections. Also found wafting through the air like a light breeze when garbage trucks drive past.
2. Horse Poop
Found in many Central Park thoroughfares.
3. Burnt Street Meat
A combination of soft pretzels, dark meat and a number of unidentifiable sauces burnt to a crisp on a food cart and carried across the sidewalk in an enticing yet somewhat disconcerting cloud.
4. Stinky Subway Car
Could be a dead animal, vomit, a guy sitting in one of the corner seats or BO from the person holding the pole next to you.
5. Laundry
Fabric softener aroma gently emerging up from the basement of an apartment building as you pass. The comfort-smell jackpot, especially in the winter, when it is often accompanied by a warm breeze.
6. Damp Subway Platform
That lovely wet concrete and stagnant water scent that can be found after a rain.
7. Nuts 4 Nuts Carts
The sweet smell of caramelized, sugar-coated peanuts, almonds, cashews, etc. Hard to resist, even if they’re all stuck in together in one big mound.
8. Exhaust
The smell of hot automotive exhaust while cars are backed up at a light or waiting to get into the tunnel.
9. Vent Fumes
The mysterious hot air blowing from vents on the sides of buildings.
10. Pee
Dog pee, human pee. Whatever kind it is, the sun baking that urine stench radiates from the sidewalk in a nostril-stinging cloud.
11. Backyard BBQ
The smell of meat grilling on sidewalk/stoop BBQs in Brooklyn.
12. Fish Markets
Fish and other unidentifiable weird smells as you walk through Chinatown. A no-go zone when you’re hungover
13. The inside of a Taxi
A combination of sweat, the driver's lunch and that musty smell you find in airports.
14. Subway Restaurants
Because you know they pump that weird vaguely sandwich-adjacent smell onto the sidewalks, and there is absolutely no way to escape it.
15. Marijuana
The skunky blast that hits you on a side street where someone’s smoking up their bag of sticky icky.
16. Manhole Steam
Also found coming out of large orange and white cylinders at construction sites and it reeks.
17. Pizza
Smelling the pies costs even less than a dollar.
18. Success
A sweet smell, often fleeting.
By Time Out contributors, edited by Will Gleason.