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New Yorkers spend plenty of time trying to avoid the city’s smells. An upcoming East Village exhibition would like you to lean in—although, mercifully, its scratch-and-sniff offerings include Christmas trees and fortune cookie factories.
Opening October 8 at City Lore Gallery, Sense & the City: Exploring New York City Through the Five Senses turns 18 years of writer Caitlin Van Dusen’s urban adventures into a multisensory tour of the five boroughs. Nearly 200 places appear through photographs and excerpts from her namesake City Lore blog, along with interactive features that invite visitors to sniff, touch and listen their way around town.
The scent strips capture everything from the balsam of sidewalk Christmas tree stands to a briny Bronx pickle factory. A “tactile rail” offers objects to handle, including dirt from Aqueduct Racetrack and a basket Van Dusen wove from invasive Staten Island vines.
For the soundtrack, there’s Surround Sounds Piano_QNS, an upright piano retrofitted by local artists Arthur Fleischmann and Daniel Giachetti. Each key plays a distinct sound collected in Queens, giving visitors a chance to hear the borough through an unusual instrument. Visitors can also sample foods from around the five boroughs at the opening reception, though tastings won’t be offered throughout the exhibition’s run.
The places documented range from Macy’s wooden escalators and McSorley’s cracker-and-cheese plate to Staten Island’s boat graveyard, Cooper Union’s anechoic chamber and faces carved into rocks on Brighton Beach. Van Dusen’s reporting has also taken her into a Long Island City sewer tunnel on a raft, through knee-deep mud to inspect sunken boats and around Manhattan’s entire perimeter.
There’s a bittersweet thread, too: 40 “ghost sites” revisit places that have disappeared or changed, including Kensington’s Buzz-a-Rama slot-car racing venue and the auto-repair shacks of Willets Point’s Iron Triangle. The exhibition doubles as a record of the city’s more easily overlooked pleasures and how quickly they can vanish.
Part of City Lore’s 40th-anniversary programming, the show runs through January 18, 2027, at 56 East First Street. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, from 12pm to 6pm; the October 8 opening reception runs from 6pm to 8pm, with RSVPs available through Eventbrite.