![]() The journey began in the bowels of one World Trade Center, where guests venture down an escalator to line up for the security checkpoint. Dogs do this all the time.Ī tourist snaps a photo from the One World Trade Center observation deck, on August 8, 2019. Why not travel for a unique scent? A dog wouldn’t find this strange. Nor is it uncommon to drive an hour or two to hear something (i.e, a concert). But people travel long distances all the time to see something-the Grand Canyon, for instance, or the Mona Lisa. It felt a little strange to be traveling 1,250-feet up into the air just to smell something. “Maybe try a neti pot,” a Gothamist editor joked, and while I didn’t have time for such in-depth preparation, I did try to keep my olfactory palate nice and clear, ready to surrender itself to the new fragrance. On the way downtown, I tried to keep my nostrils away from anything too pungent. Since it’s not bottled anywhere ( not even eBay!), I arranged to visit the observatory. I have a pretty sensitive nose-I’m usually the first to notice if the dog has rolled in something questionable or if the person next door is cooking onions-so when I learned about the new sky-high fragrance, I was eager to try it for myself. “We wanted to focus on something that was very centered.” When he experienced the eventual fragrance for the first time, “it just felt right.” “We didn’t want anything that was too floral or too citrus-y,” Douglas said. The creative process involved many different revisions of the scent and its tone. “And SMI are the engineers that make it work.” “IFF are really the chemists that come up with what we envision the scent to be,” Douglas said. “One World” was primarily developed by International Flavors & Fragrances, or IFF, which describes its purpose in pretty lofty terms as “redefining what a flavors and fragrances company can stand for by questioning everything championing creators.” That process required bringing in outside experts. “That just kind of morphed into adding a signature scent to One World, to add to the sensory experience for the visitors.” “We had been attempting to have the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking while guests were visiting, or ginger bread, or something that was really reminiscent of the holidays,” Douglas said. As he tells it, the idea first emerged during the holiday season. ![]() “We wanted it to have a refreshing tone to it.”ĭouglas is a veteran of the hotel industry (known for custom scent profiles), and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to enhance the sensory experience for visitors. “I don’t think we were looking for anything that mimics steel or glass,” Keith Douglas, the managing director of the observatory, told me in a phone interview. Which is not a smell that’s generally associated with Manhattan (unless you’re one of the goats who live in Riverside Park), but that’s largely the point. Yes, the tallest building in New York (and the entire Western Hemisphere) now has its own unique scent, diffused through the air vents for visitors’ enjoyment.įirst chronicled in a recent New York Times story-which declared, "Not everyone is a fan"-the custom-made scent was designed to evoke trees and natural beauty. ![]() I am referring to “One World,” which is the name for the new, official fragrance of One World Observatory-the tourist-friendly observation deck near the very top of One World Trade Center, high above the September 11 memorial site. ![]() There’s a new scent in the city, and no, I don’t mean the hot urine baking on the sidewalk outside your apartment. ![]()
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