the many scents of New York

On my way to a shoot the other day I realized that New York has many very distinctive and unique scents that you won't find anywhere else. (some of which you'd never want to find)
While walking down one block you can smell fresh made pizzas, fresh cut flowers, and freshly stacked garbage bags. You can smell the odor of someone hiding behind their grocery cart full of random items, smell freshly sprinkled urine on the sidewalk.
New York has some of the best smells, like when walking by bakeries, restaurants, fruit stands and flower markets. They also have some of the worse, like cigarette smoke, body odor that makes you run to a different subway car, garbage piled 6ft high, truck exhaust, urine from people and animals, dog poo that the owner left on the sidewalk, among many other things. Yet, no matter what the smells, we stay in this city because there is nothing else like it. We stay because on the same block as the garbage piles, there is a Halal food truck, a frozen yogurt truck, a taco truck, a candied nuts guy, a fresh fruit stand, a $1 pizza slice joint, and a hundred skyscrapers more glorious and unique and historical than you can find anywhere else in the United States.
New Yorkers love this city for far different reasons than tourists do. We love New York for the variety of international cuisine you can find at any time of day or night, from French crêpes, to Colombian empanadas.
We love this city for the smells, the good ones mostly, but the bad ones too, because we wouldn't appreciate the good ones as much if I weren't for the bad.
We love New York for the snooty clubs that you have to be dressed to impress to get in the door, the dive bars that have a thousand bras on the wall, the streets with a bar every ten feet, and that lone bar on your block that somehow gets packed.
We love the shopping. More designer clothing than anywhere else in the world, and more cheap trendy boutiques than you could ever shop in.
We will pay more for a place with a view of the Hudson, no matter how brown it gets. We go to free outdoor movies, and pay $15 to see one indoors. We find restaurants we love and go back even if the meals are expensive but the food is delicious. We know what days, times, and areas all the tourists will be in and avoid them at all costs. We pay more for used clothes than new sometimes just so we can call it vintage. This is the only part of the country where adult sleepovers happen almost every weekend because taking the subway home to a borough could take two hours after a night of partying so you stay with friends that live close to the bars you went to.
Manhattan is known for bums and skyscrapers, for Times Square, the Empire state building, the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. During your first visit to New York City, do the tourist stuff. Do it all and get it checked off your list. The second time you visit the city, shop in soho and canal street, go out to dinner in a fine restaurant on Park or Fifth ave, walk around in St. Marks place for a casual night, get dressed up and bar hop in the meatpacking district. Don't do anything your tour guidebook tells you to do. Do everything that you ask locals about. It's ok to take a tourist trip, you should. But your second trip, will be how you fall in love with New York City, and all of it's smells.
Xoxo