If there's one thing that's inevitable about summer in the city, it's that things will smell bad. Hot trash smells bad. Hot people smell bad. Hot subways smell bad, But today, something smelled really, exceptionally bad all over Brooklyn. What's the deal? more ›

Animal rescue workers removed 38 cats from a Staten Island home in Great Kills, where it seems the felines (half of them feral) were "living amid piles of filth and excrement, with no food or water." A Staten Island Hope Animal Rescue worker told the Staten Island Advance, "It was kind of overwhelming. They’re very, very skinny. And they looked very traumatized. I think they were a week without food. ... Some were pregnant. One had kittens already." more ›

A noxious stench is oppressing Astoria, but it's nothing a little eau de toilette can't fix. In response to complaints, the DEP is spraying a chemical perfume over a wastewater treatment plant across the East River from Astoria, on nearby Wards Island. "It smells like Chanel Number 2," one DEP worker quipped to CBS2. It's believed that the pervasive odor has blanketed Astoria because an aeration blower broke down at the plant a few weeks ago. And when the heat soared earlier this week, locals say the stink became unbearable. more ›

Residents of Hunts Point in the Bronx may at last be rid of a decades-old stench that on hot days makes the area smell “like a decaying body.” The city says it will end it $34 million-a-year contract with the organic fertilizer company, from whose premises the smell emanates. “This is a huge victory,” said Rep. José E. Serrano, a longtime opponent from the plant, which is in his district. “It was horrible—the smell, the stench. People living in the poorest Congressional district in the nation, in many cases with very little education, knew this was something they could not tolerate.” According to the Times opponents of the plant name the smell as “a symbol of the city’s disregard for Hunts Point.” more ›

The conditions inside Ming Li Sung's Long Island City apartment were so squalid that police thought the stench was surely emanating from a decomposing corpse. But when an FDNY haz-mat team kicked in the door, they were shocked to find the apartment occupied by Sung, 69, who yelled at them to get out. Instead, police took him to Elmhurst Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. His neighbors at the Ravenswood Houses say they've begged the Housing Authority for years to take action on Sing, whose apartment was so wretched that dead flies would pile up on the hallway floor. One resident, Robin McNeil, tells the Daily News, "All Housing would do was come and sweep them up," and her husband thinks the sickening stench contributed to her miscarriage in May! Yesterday, police said the apartment resembled a landfill, with rotting garbage piled floor to ceiling. When they entered the place, an "army of cockroaches" poured out into the second-floor hallway, and McNeil's husband tells the News, "The police were throwing up." Unfortunately for Sung, the mess was discovered too late to be entered in this summer's Filthiest Apartment Contest; unfortunately for the rest of us, it's lunchtime. more ›