On 2/17/2020 at 8:50 AM, wpcc88 said:

Having spent a lot of time in the south this past year any of you folks that think you’re going to escape this moving there, beware of paper mills. Charleston & Savannah have the stench of them; along with their horse drawn tours, think New Orleans.

Add Charleston SC to that list as well. Nothing worse than walking outside on a warm day and breathing in what amounts to the smell of cat piss.

A lot of the cities in northern NJ smell awful. Like burning rancid old milk cartons mixed with motor oil. What was really weird though was how my friends up there never seemed to notice it. 

Ohio City frequently smells like whatever Great Lakes is making. If it smells kinda like overripe sweet potatoes/Malta Goya, they're using barley, and if it smells like pasta, they're using wheat.

When I got sent to Jacksonville FL I decided to live in Atlantic Beach, an older beach town about 20 miles east of downtown.  The first few times I drove downtown at around the Matthews Bridge I panicked, thinking my car was on fire.  Turned out to be the combination of a brewery, a paper mill, a coffee roaster, and a vegetable cannery.

 

Nasty, although fairly local to the west side of the river.

The closer you get to the Ravenol Bridge in Charleston, SC, the more the air reeks of cat piss from the paper mills. I spent a month and half there for work and stayed pretty close to the bridge. I would gag every time I walked outside.

8 smelliest cities on earth -- and no, cleveland, lorain and youngstown are not on the list anymore! ?

 

 

https://www.tourism-review.com/worlds-smelliest-cities-for-adventurous-souls-news4507

On 9/29/2020 at 4:23 PM, mrnyc said:

8 smelliest cities on earth -- and no, cleveland, lorain and youngstown are not on the list anymore! ?

 

 

https://www.tourism-review.com/worlds-smelliest-cities-for-adventurous-souls-news4507

 

But someone is doing their best to change that!🤣

 

It's raining poop in Cleveland  made national headlines as this article was from Charlotte, North Carolina.

 

From the article:

Robinson lives nearby at Bohn Tower. For the past month, he says every time he walked to the grocery store, or he waits at the bus stop, he came across what appears to be dog waste littered all over the sidewalk.

“Then one day I seen turds, and that’s when I knew somebody was sweeping feces off the balcony,” Robinson said.

Pittsburgh is the worst. Pittsburgh smells so bad that Carnegie Mellon designed an app for residents to report it to the Health Department. It lingers forever in the valley, too. They should incentivize Yankee Candle Co. to move their factory there, to mask the smell of rotten eggs. 

Worst in Ohio I've ever experienced is Chillicothe. There's few things worse than the smell of a paper plant.  Local residents say, "That's the smell of money!" No, that's the smell of sh!t at the bottom of four septic tanks. It's also the smell of high cancer and birth defect rates. At least in Alaska they cut you a check every year for putting up with the environmental nonsense. If I lived in Chilly, I'd demand a yearly check for that. It's right in the middle of a densely populated residential area, too. You see houses and parked cars nearby, covered in soot. People walking around, in unintentional blackface, like they just got done cleaning their chimney.

 

My favorite Ohio smell... Buskin Bakery on the east side of Cincinnati.

Edited February 20, 20214 yr by David

Washington Court House smells like bacon for miles but I think they do that to keep the Muslims and Jews out. 

Edited February 20, 20214 yr by David

^^ agree with David on Chillicothe - it reeks like boiled cabbage and farts...

2 minutes ago, buckeye1 said:

^^ agree with David on Chillicothe - it reeks like boiled cabbage and farts...

LOL! That is so accurate!

I hear it was way worse until about 1985. People say you used to be able to smell it all the way on the South Side of Columbus some days.

Tacoma, WA has a large paper mill in the middle of the city which makes it famous in the Pacific NW for having the "Tacoma Aroma".

 

 

13 minutes ago, X said:

Tacoma, WA has a large paper mill in the middle of the city which makes it famous in the Pacific NW for having the "Tacoma Aroma".
 

 

 

That's funny because although I've never been there, Washington has always been portrayed to me on TV and in the media as this pristine place, when it's not a Yuppie or Techie paradise. 

Edited February 20, 20214 yr by David

Like any place mountainous, it can be prone to air quality issues at times.  During summer months the air can be smoggier than anything I've seen in Ohio, though it's not nearly as bad as LA.  And outside of summer, the air is pretty clean.  And there's a lot less litter overall than you see in Ohio.

I did a study abroad in Groningen, The Netherlands during grad school.  It was a nice small university city.  It had a very unusual smell, earthy and sweet, which came from a massive plant for refining beet sugar that was just upwind of the city.

 

edit- took a brief trip down memory lane, and it looks like there were two plants, one of which shut down a few years after I was there.  I wonder what it smells like now...

I lived in in New York when this story was big news. It took years for the city to figure out what was causing the waves of maple syrup smell:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/nyregion/06smell.html

 

Baffled city investigators began calling them “maple syrup events”: mysterious waves of sweet-smelling air that periodically wafted over Manhattan, delighting some, troubling others and vanishing as quickly as they had arrived...

 

The city revealed on Thursday that the culprit was the seeds of fenugreek, a cloverlike plant, which are used to produce fragrances at a factory across the Hudson River in North Bergen, N.J. It turned out that the city had never given up trying to determine the aroma’s origin. It had quietly created a crack maple-syrup team that remained on the case.

I lived in Pilsen in Chicago for many years, and all you can smell all the time is Suavitel and Fabuloso. It gave me a headache

Edited February 21, 20214 yr by metrocity

Oh god anything but Fabuloso!  My sincerest condolences.  

We recently visited New York City by car, from Toledo, and had the following olfactory experiences:

 

New York City in summer smells like a toilet in the middle of a garbage dump. The scents of urine and sh*t were strong just outside our hotel near Bryant Park, and my nephews had the pleasure of watching an unhoused woman do a #2 right in front of them in lower Manhattan.

 

We also brought the smells home with us; for a few days after we returned to Ohio, we would all remark that the "car smelled like New York", that pungent mix of human waste. Well, last night before a drive to Detroit, the car smelled more like New Jersey - a dead body. I removed everything from the cabin of the car, thinking for sure a rat had stowed away in NYC and had died under one of the seats, but nothing. Looking in the trunk, however, I found the opened can of wet dog food we had forgotten in the trunk, which had been roasting in sun-warmed trunk since our return a week earlier. It was in a plastic bag that, thank you Lord, remained sealed, but the dog food had turned into a rainbow of all the human body colors - black, brown, green, a little yellow, and was emitting an odor that at least told me by dog is getting good organic dog food without too many preservatives. We filled the car with Lysol and rolled down all the windows to start ridding the car of the smell of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. 

Edited July 26, 20213 yr by westerninterloper

On 3/25/2019 at 11:01 AM, mrnyc said:

i'll leave out the old rotten eggs steel plant smells, that time has mostly passed. also the wonder bread smells as you drove downtown columbus.

 

but i remember when i lived at the continent briefly in north columbus you could often smell the beer brewing from the budweiser plant nearby. you could smell it driving around I-270 too. the continent has fallen way off, but i cant imagine that mammoth bud plant brewing smell has changed.

As I was getting my colonoscopy yesterday(and wide awake because the meds did not sedate me as I told them they would not)the old smells of the Wonder Bread factory was one of the things I discussed with one of the nurses lol. Such a strong and "wonder'ful smell!

On 2/20/2021 at 11:43 AM, GCrites80s said:

I hear it was way worse until about 1985. People say you used to be able to smell it all the way on the South Side of Columbus some days.

Hell yes you could smell that nasty stuff! Especially on winter mornings in the 70's going out to wait for the school bus on the far west side that stench would be horrendous. 

 

Also does nobody remember Inland Products and the awful smells from that hellish place?

 

And the smells that would emanate from the sewage sedimentation pond called the Scioto River downtown when it was sluggish, filled with sludge and baking under a hot summer sun? I recall one Red White and Boom that was very unpleasant being too close to the river/sewage pit.  What could be seen in the river only enhanced the sense of smell as well.

Inland Products... was that the rendering plant at Jackson Pike and Frank Rd? Can't even tell it was there now since they moved Jackson Pike on top of the property last year. It staaank but not for 20 miles around like the paper mill.

49 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

Inland Products... was that the rendering plant at Jackson Pike and Frank Rd? Can't even tell it was there now since they moved Jackson Pike on top of the property last year. It staaank but not for 20 miles around like the paper mill.

Yes it was the rendering plant. And it was much closer in so it could be really bad.  The paper mill was worse though when it was bad-it was like the stench just floated up the Scioto River valley and then just spread out.  Inland Products was not as widespread but could be particularly nasty smelling. God only knows what they had in the rendering vats-this was back in the early/mid 70's when nobody seemed to give a sh*t about any of this stuff-it was just accepted and sometimes bitched about, but not much more.

Back when kids would ride their bikes right in the chemical fog behind the trucks spraying for mosquitos-and parents just watched and did not seem to care lol.  I remember that smell also-yeah I was one of those kids(probably part of why I am so demented today.) Why did we think that was fun and ok? smh.

Edited July 30, 20213 yr by Toddguy

On 7/26/2021 at 11:03 AM, westerninterloper said:

We recently visited New York City by car, from Toledo, and had the following olfactory experiences:

 

New York City in summer smells like a toilet in the middle of a garbage dump. The scents of urine and sh*t were strong just outside our hotel near Bryant Park, and my nephews had the pleasure of watching an unhoused woman do a #2 right in front of them in lower Manhattan.

 

We also brought the smells home with us; for a few days after we returned to Ohio, we would all remark that the "car smelled like New York", that pungent mix of human waste. Well, last night before a drive to Detroit, the car smelled more like New Jersey - a dead body. I removed everything from the cabin of the car, thinking for sure a rat had stowed away in NYC and had died under one of the seats, but nothing. Looking in the trunk, however, I found the opened can of wet dog food we had forgotten in the trunk, which had been roasting in sun-warmed trunk since our return a week earlier. It was in a plastic bag that, thank you Lord, remained sealed, but the dog food had turned into a rainbow of all the human body colors - black, brown, green, a little yellow, and was emitting an odor that at least told me by dog is getting good organic dog food without too many preservatives. We filled the car with Lysol and rolled down all the windows to start ridding the car of the smell of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. 

 

 

yeaaaah. *sigh*

 

this is where i tell you my early morning commute story of taking the 14st bus bus to union square irving place stop early one morning. i was waiting to get out the back door with two jamaican ladies and as soon as the doors opened what do we see but a homeless woman lift up her dress and take a dump right at us. needless to sat, we yelled to the bus driver “hol’ up!!!” and walked up to the front to get out. the whole time the ladies were saying “oh jesus, oh jesus, oh no, that poor thing.” so that woke me up — memorable way to start the day.