(Smelly) Ode to Greenpoint

I’ve been reading everywhere that sometime last week parts of New York, mainly Lower East Side and apparently some parts of Brooklyn such as Williamsburg and Greenpoint, smelled like maple leaf syrup. Um, wait, I think I mean to say maple syrup. It doesn’t matter; the point is that it smelled sweet and syrupy. Which is quite unusual for New York because usually it smells like garbage or bus exhaust. Sometimes you get a whiff of someone’s body odor but usually happens when you standing in a crowded subway car.

Well, whoever wrote that it smelled sweet and syrupy in Greenpoint which is where I live, must have gone bananas.

Greenpoint has its great spots, there are parts of the neighborhood that still have old brick mansions and some parts of the river have amazing old factories with spiraling stairs that lead right to the water so that a ship can unload. Major streets are named after families who were big in merchandise and trade. Also, some of the architecture in Greenpoint is really beautiful. My friend who is Irish told me that her aunt in her childhood days would go to Greenpoint to see the shops and go to the movies. Apparently, Manhattan Avenue used to be a bustling shopping district with movies theaters and there was a trolly that ran up and down the street. To this day, when you walk down Manhattan Avenue, you can still see intricate decorations carved into buildings and there are remnants of trolly tracks at the very end of the avenue.

There are also remnants of the McCarren pool which was built during the Depression and apparently had floodlights that illuminated the whole pool at night. Also, judging by the size of the ruins, it must have been one gigantic pool.

I don’t live in the historic part of Greenpoint. I live in the shabbily built buildings that barely comply with the NYC construction code. All the buildings are uniform and none are decorated in an interesting way. That is if you find an American flag a boring decoration. It did not smell like syrup where I live. In fact, there is a sewage processing plant near by which is located right next to a garbage processing plant. And when the wind blows in the right direction, my neighborhood smells like a combination of shit and garbage. There was definitely no syrupy smell.