A perfumer explains what stinks in Boyle Heights

Plus, garden screenings, mushroom tacos, and jazz drama.

Tasbeeh is out of office this week (devouring paella in Spain) and asked me (Tosten) to water the plants. Fortunately, I too lead a glamorous and shareable LA lifestyle. Last Saturday I stopped by Whammy’s grand reopening and caught Huell Howser’s Galco’s episode in the beautiful new screening room. We laughed as Howser gestured vigorously with his hands full of rare carbonated beverages from far-away lands like Mississippi. “Everything doesn’t have to be big and mass-produced. Cheers,” he toasted customers of the Highland Park specialty shop—still kicking, thank god.

Then writer and producer Erik Abriss drove me to the Norton Simon Museum to look at Degas’s dancers and watch Easy Rider in a theater full of Pasadenans who saw the flick back in 1969. Craving Dennis Hopper’s dirt weed but settling for modern optimized grass, I hiked after to Wisdom Tree and smoked a joint at sunset. On the way home I listened to baseball on the radio, as the game was intended, and heard my team hit a walk-off single. This wonderful day nosedived moments later when my mortal enemies acquired the sport’s best pitcher. Sorry, your substitute teacher is a Padres fan.

Inside: perfumer Maxwell Williams covers air regulators’ Lineage fire hearing and breaks down Boyle Heights smells. Weekend activities below.

District Attorney Nathan Hochman charged an LAPD whistleblower with 16 felony counts for recording fellow officers’ frequent slurs. “The system is serving to protect its own, not the community,” the public defenders union responded. Hochman’s other hits include declining to prosecute a single rent-gouging case after the wildfires.

Artists exhibited in the Frieze bonanza at the Wilshire 99 Cent Store can’t locate their work and haven’t been paid. Even for a gallery, The Hole seems bad with money.

Healing Force of the Universe is closing in October. Owner Austin Manuel hopes to revive the old Beastie Boys studio in Atwater next. Fundraiser incoming.

What’s going on with LA Jazz Festival? I’ve heard at least four bands say their sets were abruptly canceled without pay. The (Airbnb-sponsored) fest’s website scrubbed its schedule and now teases just two days of programming this month, down from the originally announced two weeks. (Update: whole thing’s kaput.)

Juliana Halpert wrote the strongest critique of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. “Not unlike visiting GAP, or any other store.”

This year’s Los Desterrados picnic launched a remarkable new digital archive of Chavez Ravine life. Highly recommend clicking “Cenovia Gamboa Madero oral history - March 10, 2001” and “Julio Cabrera stands in the field of corn that he grew in his back yard.”

I forgot to order no cheese on a mushroom taco for vegan writer-editor Justin Sayles at Ramona Room. So I got to eat it myself. Best tacos at an amaro bar in the city. (I ordered him another.)

Pour one out for Sky’s Gourmet Tacos. While we’re on the subject.

Laurie Avocado (CC)

What really stinks in Boyle Heights

Maxwell Williams is an olfactory artist and owner of UFO Parfums.

Stench. Rancid. Putrid. Offensive. Disgusting. Unbearable. Reeks.

Those are words used by Mayor Karen Bass and others to describe the smell radiating from the Lineage Logistics building during Wednesday’s public South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) hearing, convened to inform the agency’s new abatement order. “It’s an unbearable smell, and I know you know this,” Boyle Heights resident Irma Mejia told regulators. “We can feel the smells in our bodies,” said a Boyle Heights resident who just went by Carmen.

Ysabel Jurado, the neighborhood’s councilperson, relayed that 4,000 odor complaints had been filed since the fire began burning in the 500,000-square-foot warehouse on June 17. What exactly is in the air is under review. On Monday, the EPA sent a letter to Lineage giving them two weeks to supply a list of potential hazardous substances released by the fire.

This is far from the first fire at a Lineage facility. In 2024, a warehouse fire in Finley, Washington burned for 60 days. Finley residents filed a lawsuit alleging the contamination had caused eye irritation, burning throat, emphysema, pneumonia, headaches, bronchitis, dizziness, and cognitive defects.

According to the Benton-Franklin Health District in southern Washington, groundwater testing showed elevated levels of 4-methylphenol (also known as para-cresol) and phenol. Other dangers include the possibility of anhydrous ammonia released from the refrigerators, mercaptans, and polyisocyanurate, which is found in the layers of foam that line the cold-storage facilities. Methane is another dangerous (and foul-smelling) gas that could be formed as thousands of pounds of food rots.

Certainly some of the chemicals that are being released by the food are cadaverine, putrescine, and indole. These are the chemicals that are formed by decomposition—they are not considered immediate health concerns, but we know that there are psychological effects caused by decomposing smells. Skatole, another molecule formed during decomposition, is used in Skunk, the “crowd control” chemical weapon developed by companies associated with Israeli occupation forces.

The terminology Downwinders—usually applied to those exposed to nuclear testing—could be applied to Boyle Heights residents as well. The slow pace of response leaves those living near the site at risk of developing cancers, potentially shortening their lives. By the time those cancers appear, companies like Lineage often get off the hook, since causation is difficult to prove. It might be helpful for residents of environmental disasters like the Lineage fire to look into the expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was initially enacted to provide financial compensation to coal miners who develop disease later in life, and was expanded to Downwinders in 2000.

I’m a perfumer based in Cypress Park, about seven miles from the Boyle Heights site, and I have smelled it. (I’ve also had a few of those gargantuan green “flesh flies” with the massive red eyes in my house.) I’ve handled para-cresol and phenol in my lab, always with extreme care because those chemicals are potentially carcinogenic.

Southern California is no stranger to stench. I’m reminded of the smells of sewage emanating from the Tijuana River in San Diego, and I remember distinctly the complaints around the Sriracha factory in Irwindale in 2013.

Boyle Heights is a textbook case of environmental racism—let’s not forget that residents have already endured the Exide battery plant in neighboring Vernon. The neighborhood is zoned for risky warehousing and manufacturing facilities like Lineage, dating back to freeway construction through the neighborhood in the 1950s that helped set up this pattern of industrial siting in the first place. Low-income, Latino neighborhoods are treated as places where those risks are acceptable. Why aren’t Lineage’s warehouses zoned for Beverly Hills?

Both owners of Lineage, Adam Forste and Kevin Marchetti, are listed on the Forbes billionaires list, each with an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion.

📆 THIS WEEK

🍗 TONIGHT: Celebrate Lasita’s fifth birthday at their Barrio Fiesta party. Quarter Sheets, Amboy, and Randy’s Spammy’s are slinging food.

🌱 SATURDAY: Watch experimental films about gardens at a screening outside in the Arlington Garden organized by Los Angeles Filmforum and Livonian Cinema. Robert Todd, Jodie Mack, Stan Brakhage, etc.

🥁 SUNDAY: The Windgrease Festival presents a rarely-screened documentary about drummer Tony Williams in Senegal, followed by a “synthprayer.” The week’s lineup includes Angel Bat Dawid, Bennie Maupin, aja monet, and a postcard party for Mumia abu-Jamal.

🫓 SUNDAY: Enjoy a Syrian feast prepared by refugee chefs Maysaa and Abdul Kanjo at Scribble. Tickets support new arrival resettlement.

🖊 WEDNESDAY: This is the deadline to register for Poetry Field School’s fall writing workshops, including a generative fiction class with “emphasis on dramatic dialogue, graphic violence, existential complexity, nonlinear time” led by editor Chloe Watlington.

👀 LOOKING AHEAD

📽️ AUGUST 13: 11am Saturday is hosting a pregame for New Beverly’s showing of My Dinner With Andre. It’s at Franknews next door.

🚗 AUGUST 13: Urban designer Linda C. Samuels shares her new research on the Sixth Street Viaduct at MAK Center.

🥃 AUGUST 14: Cocktails and cumbia at ICA LA.

🎞️ AUGUST 15: Frank Perry’s adaptation of Play It as It Lays, at Human Resources, introduced by the writer of this great Julian Wasser essay.

🪩 AUGUST 29: Hood Rave returns with DJs from Chicago’s legendary Dance Mania label.