Courtesy New Museum
Remember when we had a perfumer create a scent based on the city’s smelliest block, which happened to be Broome between Eldridge and Allen? Well the New Museum, located just a few blocks away from that ignominious locale, is now offering up its own “visceral olfactory reminder” of the neighborhood.
The museum teamed up with a Chinatown-based design firm, Rafael de Cardenas | Architecture at Large, to create a set of air fresheners, shaped like the New Museum, that “capture an olfactory tour of the Bowery: food carts, laundromats, and coffee shops.” Honestly, we can’t think of all that many food carts or laundromats on the Bowery, but whatever, they’ve gotta smell better than the mix of ““high meat and old squeegees” that we conjured up.
Only 150 of the Bowery Scents have been made, so go ahead and snatch one up for $65. If that smells like a rip-off, consider that your purchase comes with a year-long membership to the museum and supports great programming like this: on Jan. 23, two of the world’s most esteemed chefs, Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Ferran Adrià of elBulli, will pop in for a chat and Adria will premiere his new research project, “DNA of Cooking.” The event is sold out, but standby tickets will be available at the door.