Ray Pride

"You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring, maybe not consciously, but as a rich, unconscious background to everything else." --Oliver Sack's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"

"Urbs in Horto": Chicago's official motto, on seals, stationery and the sides of our flotilla of exhaust-gusting city vehicles means "City in a Garden." Ah, the garden: trees along the boulevards, flowers in the parks, Maxwell Street pork-chop sandwiches. Sometimes Chicago's called The City That Works, true, but historically, it's also been The City That Stinks.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Until recently, it's also been Sweet Home Chicago, candy capital of the nation, native soil to the toothsome likes of Mars, Tootsie Roll and Wrigley. The city was the birthplace of Baby Ruth bars, Cracker Jack and Milk Duds. Legend has it that the founder of Hershey discovered chocolate at the same 1893 Columbian exposition that popularized the hotdog, which moved his passion from caramel to chocolate.

But Marshall Field's moved its thirteenth-floor candy kitchen on State Street to a non-union plant in Pennsylvania in 1999. Goodbye, Frango Mint. Brach's Confections moved their headquarters to Dallas after closing down here in December; Forest Park's Ferrara Pan makes most of their Lemonheads and Red Hots in climes like Quebec and Mexico where sugar (and labor) are cheaper.

And, on the Sunday after Valentine's, 3,000 jobs went away when all the Fannie May stores closed. It's a national story: Page One of the Valentine's Day Los Angeles Times compiled several thousand words, citing Illinois employment statistics that show the region's candy industry has shrunk thirty-eight percent down to about 7,400 workers, from a 1970 figure of 15,000.

Will we be left with a city that smells only of diesel and Subway vinaigrette and Mickey D grease clouds? Have we almost completed the transition from factory to olfactory town?

Every reference that ventures a translation of the meaning of "Chicago" in Potawatomi is a little different. "Strong smell"? "Stinking onion?" The first pioneers across the prairie were struck, it's said, by the patches of untended wild onions rotting into a slick of stench. More exceptional, I suppose, than fields of grass or pine trees. Arriving in Chicago in the late 1880s, a French writer named L. de Cotton stood at a ship's rail on arrival and claimed he felt the smell of Chicago, grabbing him at the throat.

At least it's not the taint of the stockyards any more. The Union Stockyards opened Christmas Day of 1865, not closing until 1971, which led to Carl Sandburg titling our town "hog butcher of the world." Upton Sinclair's 1905 "The Jungle": "There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it." H. G. Wells wrote that "Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline," chastising that very "unwholesome reek" of the slaughterhouses.

Hundreds of thousands of trees have been planted by the city since Richard M. Daley took office in 1989, putting a different face onto and more oxygen into a city far different from his father's. Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor write in their biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley, "American Pharaoh," "Young Daley could smell the fetid mixture of manure and blood that wafted over from the sprawling Union Stock Yards to the south" of Bridgeport. "The gurgling in the background was... `Bubbly Creek,' a torpid offshoot of the Chicago River that got its name from the fermenting animal carcasses and offal in the slow-moving waters."

Today, there's an industrial park where the stockyards once stood. Burnham & Root's surprisingly small limestone Union Stockyard Gate from 1875 is one of the few landmarks standing. I wanted to figure out what smells you might have smelled then. Driving down, my nose out the car window like a long-eared hound, I struggled to smell anything but cars, the cold. Ice and snow and dirty snow and slush: that's what was there.

One steak wholesaler operates near the landmarked gate. For just a moment, you can smell seepage from raw meat. There's a smell like burnt hair, then the blood that congeals at the bottom of a butcher's case. But it's easy to walk a few steps away from the smell. Even for that instant stepping over ice-crusted puddles, the electric tang of death and fear, multiply it a hundred dozen times a day, those porcine ghosts one betwixt another, this little piggy went to market, again, again, again.

And now, this little city has none.

Dominic Pacyga, who's written several books on Chicago history, relates in WTTW's "Chicago Stories: The Union Stockyards": "The first memory that anybody who grew up in the Back of the Yard has is the overpowering smell from the packing houses and the fertilizer plants, particularly from the fertilizer plants. It was pretty intense, but you got used to it." Those who grew up around Midway, near the Argo Cornstarch plant say the same thing, even though a stranger to the area is struck hard by it. "We were... out in the country and I got sick because of the smell of fresh air. When I was doing research about living in Back of the Yards," Pacyga told Channel 11, "I found memories of other kids who had done the same, and who had actually gotten sick when they left the neighborhood."

Smell is transmitted by molecules you eat (including bathroom smells), Elijah Wood's character explains in the movie, "The Ice Storm." Smell seeps into your fibers and your fabric and your sleep. You can't block out the stranger's sudden fart or their failure to bathe.

Think of saloons. Chicago taverns should have a sign at the front door: Thank You For Smoking. The late, great columnist Mike Royko grew up above a tavern, and as a young man, he worked at bars owned by both parents after their divorce. "You could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language." Beer, foam, dirty wooden floors, and cheap disinfectant: There's a Chicago smell you can still find.

I live above a 24-hour diner. At frigid temperatures like these, the smell of frying bacon creeps up to the wall-to-wall on the first landing and rests warmly there.

Crisscross the city and you'll be aswim in the smells that recall someone's childhood. Curries on Devon, chimichangas in Pilsen, garlic on Taylor Street.

On a crisp autumn night, a walk around a balanced neighborhood is a poem to olfaction. Bread rising or pies browning at a local bakery or a larger one; garlic and onions coiling from taquerias or corner bistro-ettes. The soft fug of spilt beer lurching out a tavern door. Dry leaves. (We'll talk about car exhaust, grease traps, stale urine, BK on a bus or KFC on a plane another time.)

But even above all the local savories, I'd argue for an icy 10 degree winter day as the most characteristic of Chicago smells. The smell of winter, or rather, the cessation of smell, as if it all drops to the ground, what one friend compared to the bite and rush of nicotine hitting a smoker's lungs. My favorite olfactory memory: the lingering blizzard of 1979, with epic drifts you could push people into or get pushed into. (Forgetting that when it all melted the streets were crusted with cigarette butts and dog leavings.)

But there's a more common response. The nose has a thousand different smell receptors that are supposed to detect 10,000 kinds of odors, but ask anyone who's been in the West Loop what Chicago smells like, they'll tell you the same thing: Chocolate.

The powdery cocoa smell is one of the colors of sunset. The chocolate smell that everyone seems to know is a powdery waft, cocoa or chocolate cake mix that prompts post-work rushes on mocha anythings. It dusts its way from Blommer Chocolate, one of the nation's largest commercial refiners. Their outlet store inside the factory at West Kinzie and North Desplaines was bustling on Friday before Valentine's, and outside, a swack! to the face like an extremely soft 2x4. Inside, the chocolate is overpowered by the pungent fruity smell of gummy strawberries.

Outside again, the wind picks up off the river. Sneaky bastard, smell is, it's like I've just smoked a whole pack of chocolate cigars.

Commodification persists. Values shift. Appetites change. Economies contract. Factories close. Jobs go away. Close in, we're the Small Onion, a city of candles and perfumes, fresh baguettes and fresh-brewed coffee, a big bellyful of hand-crafted tastes.

But the big smell in the City of Big Shoulders, the Hog Butcher to the World? The Snail Sautee-er of Illinois? The Bruschetta Baster of the Midwest? As long as there's Blommer and winter and CTA buses, we won't have to import the sturdiest smells we have left.

(2004-02-18)

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