A new exhibit opening next Thursday at City Lore Gallery in the East Village wants visitors to stop just looking at New York City and start smelling, touching and listening to it instead. “Sense & the City: Exploring New York Through the Five Senses” packs nearly 200 hidden corners of the five boroughs into scratch-and-sniff strips, tactile objects and an interactive piano, all built around nearly two decades of one writer's wandering.
The show draws on Caitlin Van Dusen's 18 years writing the City Lore blog, according to thoughtgallery.org. Per Time Out, those years of documenting the city's urban adventures reportedly took Van Dusen through knee-deep mud to inspect sunken boats, into a Long Island City sewer tunnel on a raft, and around the entire perimeter of Manhattan on foot. The exhibition itself opens Thursday, October 8, and runs at City Lore Gallery, located at 56 East First Street, through January 18, 2027.
Visitors will find photographs and excerpts pulled straight from Van Dusen's blog posts alongside the interactive pieces. The scratch-and-sniff strips include balsam from sidewalk Christmas tree stands and the smell of a Bronx pickle factory, Time Out reports, while a tactile rail invites people to handle dirt from Aqueduct Racetrack and a basket Van Dusen wove herself from invasive vines found on Staten Island.
A Piano Built From Queens Sounds
The centerpiece for listeners is Surround Sounds Piano_QNS, an upright piano retrofitted by artists Arthur Fleischmann and Daniel Giacchetti so that every one of its 88 keys plays a distinct sound collected in Queens. As qgazette.com reported, the artists assigned Queens-based sound samples to each key, and Fleischmann and Giachetti received a NYFA/Queens Foundation of the Arts grant to build the piece.
The exhibit's broader list of highlights reads like a scavenger hunt across the boroughs. Time Out describes stops that include Staten Island's boat graveyard, Macy's wooden escalators, Cooper Union's anechoic chamber, faces carved into rocks on Brighton Beach, and McSorley's cracker-and-cheese plate. The thought gallery event listing separately notes a Bed-Stuy subway station's ephemeral rainbow and the lost Charlotte Russe dessert among the highlights.
Tasting a Vanishing Dessert
That Charlotte Russe connects to Holtermann's Bakery, which a City Lore blog post describes as the oldest family-owned bakery on Staten Island, founded in 1878, and reportedly the only place left in the five boroughs still making the old-fashioned whipped-cream dessert, according to citylore-senseandthecity.blogspot.com.
Forty so-called “ghost sites” round out the show — places Van Dusen once wrote about that no longer exist or have changed beyond recognition, per the thought gallery listing. Time Out's reporting names two of them specifically: Kensington's Buzz-A-Rama slot-car racing venue and the auto-repair shacks that once made up Willets Point's Iron Triangle.
Opening Night Details
The opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m. next Thursday and offers food tastings from around New York City's five boroughs, Time Out reports, though that tasting is limited to the reception itself rather than the exhibit's full run. RSVPs for the opening go through Eventbrite. Once the show settles in, regular hours are listed as Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m., and the exhibition is part of City Lore's 40th-anniversary programming.
