Tag Archives: smells

Jonathan Franzen on “the smell of infrastructure”

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In his second novel, Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen describes “the smell of infrastructure.” Here is the description:

Photo by Brandon Benedict on Pexels.com

There’s a specific damp and melancholy ancient smell that comes out in Boston after sunset, when the weather is cool and windless. Convection skims it off the ecologically disrupted water of the Mystic and the Charles and the lakes. The shuttered mills and mothballed plants in Waltham leak it. It’s the breath from the mouths of old tunnels, the spirit rising from piles of soot-dulled glass and the ballast of old railbeds, from all the silent places where cast iron has been rusting, concrete turning friable and rotten like inorganic Roquefort, petroleum distillates seeping back into the earth. In a city where there is no land that has not been changed, this is the smell that has come to be primordial, the smell of the nature that has taken nature’s place. Flowers still bloom, mown grass and falling leaves and fresh snow still alter the air periodically. But their smells are superimposed; sentimental; younger than those patiently outlasting emanations from the undersides of bridges and the rubble of a thousand embankments, the creosoted piers in oil-slocked waterways, the sheets of Globe and Herald wrapped around furry rocks in drainage creeks, and the inside of every blackened metal box still extant on deserted right-of-way, purpose and tokens of ownership effaced by weather, keyhole plugged by corrosion: the smell of infrastructure.

It was out in force when Louis and Renée came up Dartmouth Street from the Green Line stop at Copley Square.

I feel I may have experienced a similar smell before in the city in similar conditions: in the big city in the evening with a bit of dampness. The smell from the roads, buildings, mass transit, and built environment is a particular one. Would I chalk it up to infrastructure? Does this require relatively few people around so that the smell of infrastructure is accentuated?

But, this might not be the exact smell of Boston. All cities have some unique features and histories that contribute to a specific milieu, including the smell. Trying to describe that in words is a difficult task and not one that I would want to take on.

Five unusual lawsuits between neighbors over smells

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Neighbors can fight over many things with numerous examples involving McMansions noted on this blog (see here and here for two cases). How about squabbling over smells? Here are five interesting cases with two examples excerpted below:

In 2001 David and Joan Gallant bought their house outside Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, from Lee and Shirley Murray, whose farm abuts the Gallants’ property on three sides. For years, the two couples appear to have coexisted peacefully, but relations soured for unnamed reasons toward the end of the decade. In 2013 the Murrays erected an unusual barrier on their property line near the Gallants’ house: a massive, reeking pile of cow dung so large it could be seen on Google Earth.

“The manure was fresh, unseasoned, wet, [and] raw,” David Gallant said in his affidavit. In 2015, the Gallants sued the Murrays, and were awarded $11,300 USD in damages…

In Singapore, a newly-arrived Chinese family living in an apartment next to a Singaporean Indian family could not abide their neighbors’ cooking smells—particularly curry dishes. The Indian family agreed to shut their doors and windows when they cooked curry, but they balked when the Chinese family subsequently asked them to stop cooking it altogether.

A government mediator helped them come to an agreement: The Indian family would cook curry only when the Chinese family was out, and the Chinese family would try a curry dish. The case caused an uproar in the Southeast Asian city-state, with many Singaporeans declaring that the agreement treated the Indian family unfairly and that the Chinese family should learn to tolerate Indian Singaporean cooking. A nationwide curry movement erupted, including a “Cook and Share a Pot of Curry” campaign and an annual weeklong series of curry-themed events.

I am now trying to imagine a case that includes the odd combination of a smelly McMansion…

Seriously, though, smells can have a large effect on quality of life. Few people want to live near a landfill or certain industrial properties. I would guess that most suburban communities don’t have a distinctive positive or negative smell outside of their regional distinctions (such as being close to the ocean or the mountains, as two examples). Perhaps this is like having a generic American accent that makes it difficult to know where someone is from – suburbs everywhere have a faint smell of lawns.

Smells can also cross property lines or units within the same property in unique ways. Indeed, you might not even notice anything until the smell is overwhelming. It can be difficult to trace the source. It may not be present at all times (in the cases above, the manure wasn’t going anywhere while a cooking smell can come and go).

Would such lawsuits involve air rights? What expectations should the average resident have that they can control the smells in their space?