Why Does New York City Smell So Bad? - Cheddar Explains 

I worked in NYC for 10 years. I remember getting off the plane in Asheville on the tarmac to visit my parents for Thanksgiving and wondering to myself, "Gee whiz, what is that sweet smell in the air?" It was fresh air.

Generations from now will look at the habit of leaving trash on the sidewalk the same way we look at how people used to throw their waste out the window in ancient times.

The first time I visited New York I was like "What the hell? Why is there garbage everywhere?". This answers the question. Thank you.

I became pregnant just after moving to New York. We lived there 5 months. Everytime I opened my window I smelled trash and weed and cigarettes. It was disgusting and didn't help that I had morning sickness. So glad we moved

When I went to New York I didn’t really notice a smell until it started raining. During summer. Nothing quite like the smell of warm trash juice.

This video went on the biggest tangent that by the end I forgot what made New York smell so bad

Even the smell cant afford to live in Manhattan anymore.

“I don’t care if the due date is in 4 years I’m still waiting until the last second to do it”

Ahh, garbage, the smell of a NYC summer. Anytime I smell it it brings me back to my childhood.

The smelliest is not garbage it’s human waste and piss.

I remember going there for my job. Coming from New Zealand it was a completely different experience I remember thinking that my bag must of gotten dipped in something but the smell wouldn't go away.

When I was a kid there, NYC had slaughterhouses that would keep their floors clean and safe by covering them with sawdust. When it got dirty they would sweep it out to the curb. When the blood-and-offal-infused sawdust started stewing in the heat with all the car exhaust, an unpleasant but not particularly offensive odor was produced. The smell was pervasive, and was the distinctive aroma of New York City back in the day.

New York : smells real bad San Francisco: hold my homeless person

Now I understand why "Smelly Cat" is from NY...

Title is misleading: It should be "Why does Manhattan smell so bad".

"cuz yo' mama lives there" was the answer I was hoping to find

It’s good to know that the problems in this city begin and end with landlords seeking maximum profits going back to the 1800s.

18th Century Planners: "But what about alleys and waste removal?" "We wont be around then to worry about it" 2020: this video

Because I shamelessly fart in public.

When I see a old metal trashcan, I always think of Tom and Jerry.

Went to NYC in September 2019 and one of the most powerful memories I have is the smell of piss that made up all my time outside. I was in Japan at the height of summer and some Tokyo streets smelled like sewage but overall NYC was waaaay worse.

In Lisbon the trash is picked up everyday (except Sunday), half the days are normal trash and the other half is recyclable trash. The trash is picked up during the night and people put the trash on the street after 20h. It's a very effective system. The city is mostly clean and does not smell.

Downtown Los Angeles also smells like piss. Reading the comments it seems that most major cities do as well.....

Title change... "Why doesn't New York City have alleys?"

I have always wondered if they really leave the trash on the sidewalks just like I seen in the movies and this video just confirmed that! Thank you! These people know why they have a pest, rodant, and odor problem but they continue the cycle that only worsens the city.

The Big Apple Better nickname= The Loaded Diaper

The answer to this question is LOTS of homeless people peeing and pooping 💩 in corners of building. You’re welcome guys -Queens, NYC native

NYC smells for me, like rust metal and burning charcoal...

Growing up in New York it was always so weird seeing alleys on TV. Even today Hollywood is uttetly incapable of understanding the fact of their nonexistance. The blocks are not donuts. It is building all the way through. Filmmakers please understand, there is no such thing as "behind" a restaurant.

me:why new york has no alleys? comissioners: because i want *M O N E Y*

6:32 not only Barcelona. In every single town in Spain we got the green dumpster (for glass), yellow (plastic, cans and tetrabrick), blue (cardboard and paper, excluding sanitary paper). Then there is some have the brown (only organic material) plus the grey (the rest of the stuff). That's the previous system. Now they are implementing a more selective system, without public dumpsters. Public workers install a metallic plate in front of your block. Those plates have a hook where you hang the bag. The trash truck cames at night. Garbage is scheduled for each day: Mondays paper, Tuesday organic etc.

New York smells bad cause it has 3 trees

In Amsterdam, they have giant metal underground garbage disposal units. They get cleared out at the end of the month and the streets are always clean.

"You've got a ruler?" - "Great, I've got an idea" ..that's how the laziest homework ever came to be.. lol

New York City: “America’s Toilet Bowl”

visited NYC three days ago and it stank. I talked about it a bunch i guess google overheard me enough to puch this video into my stream.... lol gotta love it

When I was a child we lived in a village on the West Coast of South Africa. There was a fish factory and on certain days, especially on misty days, the most horrid smell came out of a very high chimney. This smell would hang over the village for a few days at a time. Strangely I got used to it and could not understand why visitors would always go on about it

take the E train after 11pm and you'll become a connoisseur of different homeless ppl smell

Or they could start copying Amsterdam again and use underground garbage containers that are lifted up by the garbage trucks

I visited NYC for the first time last year. The smell was completely unexpected, I literally did not imagine it to smell like that and inspite of my research before visiting, no one talked about it. It's the thing that has kept me from wanting to go back the most. So odd that it is hailed for being a classic city with elegance but has such a terrible smell.

I thought it was from everyone farting at the same time.

It was worse in the 70s and 80s, remember that

What is missing here apparently is a serious plan about waste reduction and recycling. First of all separating organic waste from other components would reduce smell (paper, plastics, metals, don't smell that much, while the organic part is what smells the most). Also boosting shops selling bulk products would help a lot. But it seems like one of the richest city in the world is stuck in the seventies way of waste management, as the answer seems to be "well, you know, we don't have alleys..."

Since when is having a trash can on the street "Revolutionary"???

When she says "today Google" my phone thinks I'm saying "ok Google" and closes RU-vid.

Watching this video I'm so thankful I live in the wide open west.

ill be damned if i take slander from a goddamn resident of boston

Mrs Esther is legit and her method works like magic I keep on earning every single week with her new strategy,......

NY is the filthiest place that I've ever been. After a day of walking around thru Manhattan/ Brooklyn, getting in and out of subways and cabs, I felt like taking an extra long shower plus soaking my body in a tub filled with hydrogen peroxide. It may be dirty in the south but it's nasty in the North baby. It was a shock to my system to see rats running up and down the sidewalks in broad daylight. I guess when they say, "If you can make it in NY, you can make it anywhere," has more to do with an immune system response than anything else.

As a person who lives in NJ, I can only quote a band called F.E.A.R “New York’s alright if you like saxophone.”

0:30 I'm pretty sure the subtitles wanted to say 'olfactory' not 'old factory' lol

It was said that the smell of Medieval Prague alone was enough to ward off any invading army.

I've lived in New York City for years, so I'm nose blind for the most part. I only smell something if it's on the same block.

You know, I can eat a peach for hours.

3:22 accurate representation of the manhattan street grid.

I grew up watching Friends, idolizing their NYC lifestyle. I've been a few times as an adult... between the stench, lack of accessibility for the disabled (me), lack of green space (something I'm used to but had no idea I valued until visiting), and inability to see what's around before you reach it due to tall buildings--versus the suburbs where you can see many places all around, easy driving to get there, and parking, etc... oof, NYC is just not for me.

Nothing else like the fresh breathe of air you get while strolling down Canal St 😭

I don’t think it smells, wel yes some parts you can really get a waft of it but otherwise it’s fine

imagine what it was like when there were thousands of horses clopping around ☹🤧🤢

I'm actually impressed to find out those creepy alleys we see in American movies serve the purpose of storing garbage. Here in Brazil (at least the cities where I've lived in São Paulo state), most houses and buildings have an elevate "transh container" in front of them, and it is usually collected most of the days by the prefecture.

Really bad

The people from India love the smell of New York, they say it reminds them of home, especially Chennai.

Never been to NYC but I’ve lived in LA all my life and the smell is always good food / cooking (Mexican food in some areas, Asian food in other areas) and a strong smell of gasoline / smog. It’s that good mixed with smog/gas and also jacaranda trees (ones with purple flowers) that smell so good

New York is very filthy especially Brooklyn too. I live in New York since 1997.

The long subway corridor between Times Square and Port Authority smells so bad. To add on to the smell, the Port Authority Bus Terminal itself smells awful but at least you can hear classic music when you wait for the bus

"You can smell the shit from 5 miles away.."

It has that cluttered, lived in feel with no easy place to dispose of the trash effectively. You can't simply toss your trash out on the curb and have it dumped into the ocean

Smelly city and overpriced everything! How could you go wrong?

Im blessed to say i live in ottawa on ca , one of the cleanest greenest city on earth.

I was travelling to Florida via I95 in July of 1993 and passing through Georgia the smell hit me like a bus, rotting vegetation is how I would describe it. I lived in Washington DC I emigrated there from the Midlands in the UK, when i went home to visit that was the first thing I noticed how clean and fresh the air smelled as appose to Washington smelling like a swamp.

I’ve been to NYC dozens of times over the past two decades and I never thought it smelled bad. I’ve been to all boroughs except only driven through Staten Island. However, Chinatown on a hot summer day can be nasty, but only on the blocks that have fish markets.

What I want to know is, why are their rats bigger than my cat and why is there so frigging many of them? It's like a recipe for the black death.

New York needs sealed dumpsters. Could take up a few parking spaces and maybe extend underground.

Why am I watching this? I don't even live in New York 😂

Am I the only one who think it don’t stink in new york

They literally poop and pee on the sidewalks! What did you expect it to smell? Roses? It's all concrete.

“We don’t have alleys” is such a nonsense excuse to pile your garbage on the sidewalks. Plenty of cities do underground communal dumpsters with pickups multiple times per week and have no issues with garbage piling up.

Now I know how to describe the smell of when I come out of the bathroom

"communal dumpsters on each block" that's a good idea.

Hong Kong is my favourite city ‘aroma’ esp near the harbour and TST lol

what alley ways. in civilized citys you just got an extra room for your trashbins. every new house is required to have such room, every old house (and in my city a few houses are older than the americas) have a room that can be adapted. but at least you got standardized bins which closes and do not release smell. it just seems like a common problem, and we do have this problem here too: "we have always done it that way, so thats the way we do it!"

When you live next to New Jersey, some of that stink is bound to waft over.

Answer: King Kong has a dumpster here.

Video: “In New York they put trash bags on the sidewalks.” Me: “Why can’t they store it underground or in basements like we do here in Sweden?” Video: “A solution could be something like Sweden’s underground storage.” Me: “I know right!”

@3:00 I'm surprised the widths of roads in NY were 60 feet and 50 feet. As a former British colony, I would have thought NY would have been laid out using road widths of 66 feet, which is the length of a Gunter's chain. A chain was a measuring tool which was 66 feet long and subdivided into 100 links. Chains had been used in England since at least 1620, so they should have been available for surveyors in the NY colony. My city, Winnipeg, Canada, was surveyed using Gunter's chains. Road allowances were 33 feet across (1/2 chain), major streets were 66 feet (1 chain), arterial routes were 132 feet (2 chains) and back lanes were 16.5 feet (1/4 chain, later simplified to 16 feet even). Roads were laid out parallel to the original French "long lot" system, in which farms had narrow frontages on riverbanks, and which extended inland perpendicular to the rivers for 2 miles. So, in Winnipeg, you'll see long blocks of parallel roads running perpendicular to rivers, intersected by cross streets 33 feet wide, and serviced with back lanes. The units of measurement have changed --- we use the metric system now --- but vestiges of the Gunter's chain are everywhere. Vestiges of the Gunter's chain are found everywhere in the USA, too. The Saxons used to measure their fields using "furlongs" of 660 feet. The chain was defined as 66 feet long, or 1/10 of a furlong. A mile was defined as 8 furlongs. So a mile in America is (66 feet/chain) X (10 chains/furlong) X (8 furlongs/mile) = (5280 feet/mile). So if you ever wanted to know why a mile is 5280 feet long, now you know.

I love leaving things to the last minute.

I lived in Tokyo for two years and recently moved to New York City and while Tokyo is generally cleaner, NYC doesn't smell any worse than Tokyo does. The garbage is left on the streets just the same in Tokyo as it is in NYC, so the idea that New York is exceptionally smelly is just an unfounded stereotype in my opinion.

The cost to live and stay there is outrageous...yet, been there and was shocked at the filth. I’m surprised they haven’t created a pandemic on their own.

Ooh. All that lovely bin juice left behind after the bin men pick up the bags must smell lovely.

I went to New York for the first time two months ago after living in chicago my whole life. I really don’t get the hype. Everyone was so mean and wouldn’t talk to you and I don’t get the lack of alleys. It was disgusting and I could never live there

New York: smells bad St. Louis: hold my Glock.

Funny I was just in NYC..walked all the way from 34th and 8th to 57th and 10th..all I smelled was food and weed. Bought a pre-rolled mini cigar packed with decent ganja off a legal bus parked like a food truck. I live in NJ and believe me, New Brunswick, NJ is a stinky city! Oh and btw San Francisco takes the cake for stinkiest city..no doubt.

There is mad garbage all over the place and over by the belt pkwy in Brooklyn, when the tide is low that really stinks.

A couple of months ago, I asked my dad if I could see NY for myself (after watching a ton of movies started there), but my dad told me after his first visit, he was so disgusted with the amount of filth and shitty garbage in the alleys. And since I rather avoid that, I’ve just been sitting still. Question is, I’m pretty sure residents who live there are also disgusted with the smell, so why the hell aren’t they doing anything? Or the government? Like a community cleanup? Do they seriously not care?

Dude- Have you ever been to Hong Kong. Makes NY smell like roses

I live in a small town in Queens and the smell is Horrendous in the Summertime. I know one thing is for sure by this time next year I’m leaving NYC. It’s just too depressing and Disgusting 🤢

Regarding all things smelly in NYC, I lived there for most of my life. On a hot summer day when the asphalt is so hot it's pliable, the smell of rain steaming up from the streets and roofs may be my favorite smell. It instantly transports me to my childhood when I'd have summers off with nothing to do but play in the streets and parks. And the myriad of smells in the city is one of the great things about it, yes even the garbage. Another smell that has largely disappeared is the smell of incinerating garbage coming from large apartment buildings. I lived in a smaller pre-war apartment building in the East Village and most of the windows opened onto an air shaft adjoining the large building. I'd often smell the incinerating garbage as it was sucked down the air shaft and under my apartment which was directly over the alley entrance to the back of the building. Yes, there are alleys in NYC, but they are generally very narrow providing access to the services coming into the building in the basement. In fact garbage cannot be put out on the sidewalk more than some number of hours (between 12 and 24?) before pickup which is generally every 2-4 days depending on the population density of the local area. So no, garbage is not stored on the sidewalks all the time, just for the hours before it's picked up. Before that it's generally stored in a garbage room in the basement of the building, or if the building has some area in front like a smaller building with a gated area in front.

Paris! I was'nt into this "romantic air" about it. Until I've visted it last month OMG! ❤

One of the many and increasing number of reasons why I never want to go to New York.

Yeah.... but have you smelled Hong Kong? And everything tastes like the stinch of Hong Kong.