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This Heat Makes NYC Smell Like Teen Spirit, Patrick Ewing’s Sock

Walk through the streets of New York, and you’ll smell a lot of things. Some of them are pleasant — the Nuts 4 Nuts cart is a personal favorite — and some of them make you want to die. A nice assortment of these smells are collected in a new scratch-and-sniff children’s book called New York, Phew York, which came out this week thanks to funding from Kickstarter. As we were scratching and sniffing our promotional copy today, we got to thinking about another smell, one which the book didn’t include but is fairly prominent in the city right at this very moment. We speak, of course, of Heat Wave Smell.

What, exactly, does Heat Wave Smell smell like? On Twitter, a few cranky and probably sweaty New Yorkers attempted to describe the wicked stench that’s descended upon us these last two days.

Sometimes, it’s almost inspiring:

Or makes us nostalgic for the nineties Knicks:

But most of the time, it’s just disgusting:

NYC Smell Like Teen Spirit, Patrick Ewing’s Sock