Issue 35: What's that smell?

The JC Smell, toy drives, holiday shopping, and more.

Happy Sunday! By reader request, this week I explore the history of the Jersey City Smell. Enjoy the rest of your weekend! — Amy

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What’s that smell?

Oh, Jersey City.

Perhaps you have walked out side of your door on a particularly warm day in summer. Or perhaps it was a crisp, cool, autumn afternoon. Or maybe, it was the middle of winter. And you’ve taken a big old sharp inhale of fresh, Jersey City air and… gagged. Or at least wondered to yourself, My god, what is responsible for that stench? It reappeared recently, and I was just knocked off my feet when I smelled it.

The Smell is hard to describe (is it only the South/West parts of the city that get it? I don’t remember it when we lived in JSQ or Lafayette). It’s a mix of barnyard animal and roasting garbage in the sun. There’s a little bit of decomposing body mixed in, along with the sharp scent of armpit. Sometimes it’s a little bit faint, just sort of hovering in the distance, and other times it’s overwhelming. And then, it disappears and you kind of forget about it. Weeks will go by. Everything will be fine. And then, it will return.

Over the years I’ve talked to numerous elected officials about what The Smell is, and how we can stop it. I practically begged Joel Brooks to make The Smell a core part of his platform (he, perhaps wisely, chose not to). Everyone has their theory. I decided to set out and search the Jersey Journal archives to find out what I could, and how long we’ve been living with this.

First off, it’s tough to search for something like this. “Smell” isn’t distinct enough of a search term, so eventually I added “‘smell’ and ‘stench’” together. That works, up until you go back to the 1970s when the Journal covered national news, so you start getting stories of bad smells in Honolulu popping up in your searches that you have to sift through. I eventually settled on: smell stench “Jersey City”. This seemed to work, and brought back over 300 hits from an archive that goes back to 1867.

One of the earliest mentions I could find was from 1895¹:

There used to be quite a few slaughterhouses in Hudson County, and many of them created really putrid smells, either from their poor sanitary situations or from illicit side businesses being run out of them (more on the latter in a moment). This particular one was so disgusting that the author assigned to the story writes:

The reporter desires to say right here, that it was the most disagreeable assignment he ever received, and he prays he may never have another like it. He has a pretty strong stomach, and it came very near going back on him yesterday.

The owner of the slaughterhouse denies all responsibility:

So desirous was he to disabuse the minds of the visitors of any suspicion that the atmosphere is poisoned by sickening stenches from the abattoir, that he called upon some of the other employees, who declared the place to be innocent of distributing the terrible smells.

Digging through the Journal’s archives, the issue of The Smell appears and reappears over and over. Throughout the years, it is attributed to many different things, including but not limited to: garbage barges, garbage trains, meat rendering plants, pig farms, the PJP Landfill, illegal dumps, chemical spills, and, as noted, various abattoirs which over the years which have caught fire, flooded, and had pigs escape and run free through the streets of Jersey City. Also, continuously, The Smell gets blamed on a bunch of nearby locations, including — in order of the magnitude of the blame given to them — Bayonne (most stories blame Bayonne), New York, Secaucus, and Newark.

Nearby pig farms and their adjacent slaughterhouses are blamed over and over til about the 1950s, including one that had a secret still in it (that illicit business I referred to before), from August of 1940²:

Well, I’m pretty sure that when I go out and smell something foul in my neighborhood today, it’s not pig farms. At least, it’s not current pig farms — perhaps it’s the ghost of the pig farms? — that’s causing the unbelievable stench in my neighborhood. So, what is it?

You have to jump forward to the early 2000s to start seeing some salacious Journal headlines ala the NY Post in their glory days. Under the headline STINK LEADS TO DUMP RAT³ written by Jennifer Morrill (who would go on to be spokesperson for both Jerramiah Healy and Steve Fulop in later years) in 2002, the details of an illegal dumpsite in Greenville emerge:

Police and city officials were led to the site as a result of the stench that was emanating from the sludge being stored on the yard.

“As the temperature got warmer, the smell got greater,” said Jersey City Lt. Mike Louf. “It’s nauseating.”

Ok, surely the city has cleaned all that up, right?

By 2007, a JJ headline blared, NEW YORK, SMELL OF A TOWN⁴, and the story begins with:

No, you stink!

At least one Hudson County official took a shot across the Hudson yesterday aimed at silencing the Big Apple bigmouths for trying to blame New Jersey for Monday morning’s foul order.

“With the winds coming from the northeast yesterday morning, it seems to me the smell would have come from the vicinity of Brooklyn,” said Jack Burns, coordinator of the Hudson County Office of Emergency Management in Secaucus.

“They were emptying buildings (in New York). The smell was much weaker over here.”

Burns comments came in response to authoritative-sounding statements from New York City officials — uttered without much proof.

Yeah, ok I get it. There was a bad smell; NYC blamed it on us, and we blamed it on them. Ha ha we say it’s your fault and you say it’s ours, oh well we just have to agree to disagree YEAH BUT WHAT SMELLS SO BAD AND WHAT IS IT DOING TO US? DID ANYONE EVER GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS?

Just eleven months later, another headline blares⁵:

I don’t know — is this normal that a city should continuously smell bad over and over for so many years? There’s no mention of the earlier story in this one. It’s just like, hey the city smells really bad and then oops it smells bad again, and probably they’re not related?

In this case:

The steadily rising stink at Reliable Paper Recycling in Jersey City reached a nose-holding high Tuesday when waste wood at the mulch maker caught fire.

Firefighters doused a smoldering pile of wood at the Caven Point Avenue facility Tuesday around 8:45pm, said Fire Director Armando Roman — who himself cut short Halloween decorating outside his house Tuesday night because of the stench.

“I couldn’t stand it out there,” Roman said. “That place had the whole city stinking (Tuesday) night.”

This is the best part. From later in the article:

The smell, Vene said, is a “temporary situation” that will change “once the material gets accustomed to this temperature.” [Ed. note: WHAT?!?!?!?!?!!?]

“The (ultimate) solution is to scale back the operation, “ Bene said. “That’s been a plan that was started in April and we are continuing to do so.”

In the meantime, local residents are suffering.

“It’s hideous. It’s everywhere,” said Lafayette Street resident Amy Scott about the odor. “I came back from a run (yesterday) and walked across the street, and the little girl said, ‘You smell like ham.’”

I don’t even know what to do with this information. Some random child, not introduced to the reader until the very last sentence of the article, appears and tells a townsfolk that she smells like ham and I’m just supposed to be ok with this? What does this mean? Ham — like the abattoirs of the 1890s? Like the ghosts of the dead pigs that once lined Communipaw Avenue??? What is happening???

Anyway, I have no idea. But I’ve been told that if you smell something, the DEP is actually interested to know about it and that they’re tracking the situation. You can call them at 1-877-927-6337 next time you smell it. Seems like The Smell has been with us for a long time, and will likely stay, at least for now.

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TOY DRIVES TOY DRIVES TOY DRIVES!!!

Friends, there are a million toy drives happening in Jersey City right now, but I wanted to draw your attention to two of them in particular. If you live on the West Side, these are two of our public schools that are having registry-based drives, so it’s super easy to order something for the kids there. You just place your order and it gets delivered directly to the school — could not be easier. I organized both of these registries and there’s loads of toys under $20, so it really doesn’t take too much to help make a kid’s season brighter.

The first is for PS 33 on Union Street. They’re just trying to get about 40 toys for kids in need there:

The second is for PS 39/Dr. Charles DeFuccio School on Plainfield Ave (near Holy Name Cemetery):

JCMAS and the Royal Men Foundation are also having a toy drive, but we’ve got a good amount coming in for that already. The above two drives (PS 33 and 39) really need your support. If it’s possible for you to share one or both of the above graphics, that also would be very helpful.

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Holiday Pop-up shop: Hudson Co. Threads

A lot of local craft fairs have been scaled back or canceled this year, due to COVID. This leaves Friend-of-the-Newsletter Hudson Co. Threads to branch out on their own with a mini pop-up shop next week at Harry’s Daughter:

Hudson Co. Threads makes embroideries that celebrate NJ/JC life. Yes, they have your holiday-themed hooped embroideries, but then they also have pieces like this:

hudsoncothreads

A post shared by Hudson Co. Threads (@hudsoncothreads)

…and have memorialized classic NJ moments like that time a bunch of officials accepted bribes in coffee cups and paper bags and whatnot:

https://www.instagram.com/hudsoncothreads/p/CIrkLhAjqzn/?utm_medium=copy_link

Anyway, these are unique gifts for your hard-to-shop-for NJ news junky — be sure and check them out!

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ICYMI

Jersey City supervillain Paul Fireman — aka the billionaire who wants to build a private golf course in Liberty State Park — has a hobby of raising horses for the Kentucky Derby and naturally, takes it as a tax write-off. It’s great:

All Americans are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the happiness of the wealthy can come with an added bonus: It’s subsidized by taxpayers. Billionaires can not only deduct the costs of buying, owning and training thoroughbred horses, but they can treat all manner of pastimes and side pursuits as businesses, and then tap those businesses as an extra source of deductions. By contrast, if you’re a middle-class person with a passion for thoroughbreds and you attend the Kentucky Derby, neither the money you spend on your ticket to sit in the grandstand nor, say, the $20 you blow in bets would help you lower the taxes you owe on your wages.

[Deep breath.]

Meanwhile, outgoing BOE President Mussab Ali is looking to wipe away local school kids’ lunch debt:

Board of Education President Mussab Ali said the board is hoping to vote on the measure to forgive all student lunch debt at the Dec. 16 meeting, the last of the calendar year. Students have not been charged for lunch this year, but some students have debt that has carried over from previous years, Ali said.

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1. Jersey Journal, 27 July 1895, p. 1. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view? p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1243C89DEE4DC187%40EANX-NB-1246DAB6F8A324F3%402413402-12468375993825F6%400- 12468375993825F6%40. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.

2. Jersey Journal, FINAL ed., 15 Aug. 1940, p. 24. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1243C89DEE4DC187%40EANX-NB- 161AF048C1DD029B%402429857-161616928A286DF2%4023-161616928A286DF2%40. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.

3. Jersey Journal, 10 Apr. 2002, p. 1. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view? p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1243C89DEE4DC187%40EANX-NB-179A0380230CFD55%402452375-179A027BC64E334C%400- 179A027BC64E334C%40. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.

4. Jersey Journal, 10 Jan. 2007, p. 5. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view? p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1243C89DEE4DC187%40EANX-NB-179B07CC073773EC%402454111-179AFB80E901F782%404- 179AFB80E901F782%40. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.

5. Jersey Journal, THE BAYONNE TIMES ed., 1 Nov. 2007, p. 5. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=image/v2%3A1243C89DEE4DC187%40EANX-NB- 179B008BA44A858F%402454406-179AF37B459A3787%404-179AF37B459A3787%40. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.