Smells from the past

In Riverside Park, Manhattan

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:

As we slide into fall and the rays of the sun slant lower, I’ve been thinking of the past more, and especially about New York City, where I lived in 1971-75. I especially remember the smells, such as the unexplained (to me) whiff of old wet bread almost every day when I walked up and down Riverside Park, on Manhattan’s West Side. The park is dramatically sited along the Hudson River, but in my time could be a tad dangerous and “exotic’’ (Haitian Voodoo specialists sacrificed animals there.) I always walked fast. Other New York smells: rotting garbage during sanitation workers’ strikes, the stink in hot weather off the East River, which is now much cleaner, and hot dogs and pretzels at those food carts.

Indeed, smells send one back deep into the past. When I smell diesel, I think of Paris in the ‘70s and ‘80s, where most vehicles were/are powered by that foul fuel. When I smell oysters and crabs at restaurants, I think of Delaware, where I worked for a few months and nearby Chesapeake Bay – what H.L. Mencken called “the immense protein factory.’’ Then there’s the smell of wet green leaves ripped off trees in tropical storms in the early fall and, later in the season, the sweet aroma of burning dried-up leaves that we’d raked (creating whispering sounds) into piles – a practice now banned in most places; too much air pollution. And wood smoke takes me back to New Hampshire, especially in those damp, corn snow March days.

As for Providence, I’ll always associate it with the seaweedy scent of Narragansett Bay when the wind starts coming in from the south and crooked but “colorful’’ Buddy Cianci’s powerful cologne as he walked into my office at The Providence Journal.