Comments on: Ew, ewwww that smell

Question: Ew, ewwww that smell

tallthinone — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 14:56:14 -0800

LosAngeles-talk: what's that strange, "burnt-toast" smell at night? I've lived in the La Cienega-Beverly-Fairfax-3rd Street neighborhood (box?) for the last few years and I've yet to find anybody who knows what it is, so I thought I'd ask here.

• It will appear for three or four nights in a row.
• It usually arrives at 10 pm or later.
• It sort of slowly settles over the neighborhood...eventually seeping into the apartment. It's tough to fall asleep if you can already smell it, and at times we've woken up because of it.
• Burnt toast is how a neighbor described the smell when my girfriend asked about it. I think it smells more like exhaust or burnt clothes.

So, any ideas?

By: peep

peep — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:04:12 -0800

I think I know the smell, although I've never been in LA at night. Industrial NW Portland smells like this sometimes. It's very burnt, but sometimes it smells like hot dog water to me. Someone who worked in the area told me it's a hot metal smell - they said it smelled like welding, and is probably a mixture of smells coming from a variety of manufacturing companies.

By: Iron Rat

Iron Rat — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:29:59 -0800

We have it in Santa Barbara to, I always thought it was a bakery or a coffee roasting place.

By: MonkeySaltedNuts

MonkeySaltedNuts — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:33:30 -0800

Anyway to tell what the prevailing wind patterns are or if there is and inversion going on? Vernon is a fairly stinky industrial area.

By: lonefrontranger

lonefrontranger — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:36:22 -0800

I know nothing about LA, however I do know that in Denver a similar smell = a combo of rendering plant and whiskey distillery. depends which way the wind blows.

By: Rash

Rash — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:27:50 -0800

I always thought it was ... a coffee roasting place.

Possibly -- to me, the smell of roasting coffee is nothing like coffee, except at the very end. My impression though is that's usually a daytime activity.

By: lannanh

lannanh — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:57:13 -0800

I used to live in Cincinnati and I know that smell, I always thought it was a cross between toast (not necessarily burt) and puke.

I figured it was from the DeKuyper/Jim Beam distillery.

By: buggzzee23

buggzzee23 — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:01:51 -0800

Could it possibly be burnt molasses? Foundries pour hot metal into molds constructed of a sand/molasses mix and produce a smell I've always enjoyed.

Another possibility is a neighbor surreptitiously incinerating their garbage as a means of avoiding a bill from the trashman. Garbage incineration has a very unique smell and there aren't a lot of us left that are old enough to remember the smell from back in the day when every SoCal house had an incinerator in the backyard. We spend a few days a month at our house in Fontana and the smell of latenight bootleg incinerators has become fairly common there as disposal rates have skyrocketed.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:07:21 -0800

Smoke.

At night as the air cools you are getting a temperature inversion which is holding smoke down where you can smell it.

Where exactly is it coming from? I don't know, some industrial plant or a house with a fireplace or a house with a trash fire. Plants will often up their emissions at night though.

By: donguanella

donguanella — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:14:27 -0800

I have no idea. However, in my neighborhood (Hancock Park) during this time of year -- a team of workers seem to cover every lawn in the neighborhood with compost. It stinks.

It usually happens both in the fall and in the spring... and manages to permeate everything. If it's an occasional scent, perhaps it's fertilizer.

By: mattholomew

mattholomew — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:59:16 -0800

It's not the semen trees of Los Angeles, is it?
(scroll down the page after the link)

By: c:\awesome

c:\awesome — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 20:03:13 -0800

I used to smell this exact scent when I lived in Columbia, Missouri. I was told that it was coming from a funeral home where they performed creamations. I never knew how I could verify this, but I did live right down the street from one, and I only smelled it during the day.

By: o0o0o

o0o0o — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 21:37:16 -0800

It could just be a good old brush/forest fire. They happen at least a few times a year.

By: univac

univac — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:12:59 -0800

Skunks!

I smelled them the most when I lived in the Los Feliz/Silver Lake area, but they are everywhere.

I might not have caught this, if it weren't for an LA Weekly article I read years ago. It described the skunky smell as resembling burnt toast and mint.

It's neither a rendering plant, nor smoke, nor trash fires, nor semen trees, nor a crematorium.

Skunks, skunks, skunks.

By: turducken

turducken — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:31:59 -0800

I live in LA.

- The Semen Trees are real, but it's a summertime thing.

- A portion of the Valley smells like burnt toast/baking bread at night, up near the Anheiser-Busch brewery. This would ordinarily be my best guess, but you're too far down, unless there's some crazy thermal inversion thing going on.

- Canter's bakes their bread and delicious rugelach at night.

- If it really smells like exhaust, it could be a re-roofing job for a flat roof. These take about 3-4 days and stink like a mofo.

By: turducken

turducken — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:37:47 -0800

...and like univac, I've smelled the LA skunks. But there's regular skunk smell (which everyone knows) and super-Los-Angeles-skunk smell, which means the bastards are in heat and live under your bedroom floor. This does not smell like burnt toast or burnt clothes, it smells like death. Sexy animal death, that makes you want to vomit, then crawl under the house with a WWII-era flame-thrower and smoke the vermin out.

If you have a strong constitution and a knack for understatement, it may indeed be skunks.

By: mandymanwasregistered

mandymanwasregistered — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:47:33 -0800

Might it be related to the nearby-ish tar pits in the hood?

By: markhu

markhu — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:56:36 -0800

I don't live in that exact area, but here is my L.A. smell anecdote that might help explain it: I live near the Adams & Brooks factory (they make P-Nuttles and other candy) and I notice that they seem to run in batches, since the smell changes every few days.
Also, curiously, they have no signage at all. The only way I happened to discover where they are located was by reading the address off a package of P-Nuttles. There are lots of businesses with no signs, or cryptic signs.

By: Monkey0nCrack

Monkey0nCrack — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 09:24:34 -0800

I too have smelled the semen tree of Southern California, in fact, there are a bunch of them here.

By: fishfucker

fishfucker — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:51:51 -0800

damn it. I was hoping there was a definitive answer in this thread. I've smelled this in industrial areas of SF and Oakland for years.

one thing I do know, it sure as hell ain't skunks.