John Metcalfe
John Metcalfe was CityLab’s Bay Area bureau chief, covering climate change and the science of cities.
For the charred noses who live in "Smell-A," this news comes as no surprise: Your city is making headlines as the smelliest burg in America.
But that's a good thing, according to a ranking of odorous cities by GQ's "globe trotting scent critic," Chandler Burr. This masterful sniffer used a matrix you might not expect, given the nature of the assignment: Rather than be distracted by the foulest and most abrasive stenches, he takes into account a city's cumulative smell punch.
Burr swishes not just sewer gases and bus-stop urine clouds, but the aroma of flowering trees, the musk of beautiful ladies (and men) and the unique bouquet of each city's air as it interacts with the prevailing weather patterns.
By this standard, he deems Los Angeles' fragrance bomb unrivaled by any other city in the nation:
There's the ocean breeze from Santa Monica that can travel as far East as Silver Lake; a dry desert air that comes West over Downtown and South Central; the astringent balm of eucalyptus, pine, honeysuckle, and jasmine from the hills; and car exhaust from catalytic converters, which is, in its strange industrial way, beautiful. It's like the jolt of a drug: shifting, comforting, cool like a blanket. The lonely smell of the marine layer burns off and you get this flashy perfume of hot asphalt, engines, and sun block that you can find nowhere but in L.A.
The esteemed nose also tags as particularly tangy the air above New Orleans, San Francisco and Pleasantville, N.Y. The worst smelling city in the world? That would be Paris, where poor dental hygiene and smoking habits have made the communal breath smell like "smoke-cured human bacon."
You can decide for yourself if Burr got the smell order correct by visiting the full ranking. In such a subjective experiment, there are bound to be differences in opinion. Maybe if Burr had traveled more on public transportation, for example, he would've knocked L.A. down a few slots. Take a look at these Yelp comments on the city's Blue Line Metro:
Photo taken by Wikimedia user Jane; classy smell lines and flies added by the author.