Thanks to Mary M.
BY FELIKS BANEL
Reporting live from Seattle’s past
With the arrival of 90+ degree heat this week, downtown Seattle is getting that summer-in-the-city smell once again – part seaweed, part exhaust, with maybe a pinch of rotting garbage from an old brick alley, plus a generous amount of rain-free, dusty asphalt and concrete thrown in for good measure.
That same collection of smells, more or less, has been around for at least the past several decades. But what did Seattle smell like a hundred years ago or even two hundred years ago?
https://omny.fm/shows/the-resident-historian/making-scents-of-how-seattle-smelled-a-century-ago/embed
When I think of quintessential summer smells in the Northwest, I recall the hot, sweet perfume of cedar branches filtering down to the shady July sidewalk, or the ripe blackberries along the Burke Gilman Trail becoming as aromatic as little pies hanging on the August vine. And they’re even still warm when you put them in your mouth.
But I also think of my earliest memories of downtown Seattle, which would be about 50 years ago in the early 1970s.