The glorious smell of an old garage
A question for academic researchers: What causes all old garages to smell the same?
When I recently opened the door to an old garage, the smell brought me back to the backyard garage in Fargo where Grandma Geiszler stored her 1954 Chevy — and to countless other garages I have stuck my nose into over the decades.
The old garage smell probably has simple origins — something to do with decades of oil drips on rough concrete combined with the scent of the deteriorating rubber of old bicycle tires, mixed with the smell of dry, unfinished wood.
But the memories the sweet smell of an old garage brings back are anything but simple. For me, the old garage smell carries a whiff of history: Old license plates, antique shovels, cracked fan belts, manual tire pumps — a rich mix of mementos and obsolete gadgets.
The old garage smell brings back memories of long-dead uncles — of Uncle Allan, Uncle Glenn, and Uncle Don — and many other folks we visited on vacations who lived in big old houses where the men would escape to the garage for man talk while the womenfolks readied dinner inside.
Old garages tantalized me as a child. I wanted to get in there and see what gadgets I could uncover, but the door was too heavy for me to lift.
Grandma Geiszler allowed us free reign of her house and yard, but kids were banned from the garage. Those springs might explode and those cables might snap and you might just get crushed by that heavy, single panel door.
Like many of the best smelling garages, Grandma’s opened onto the back alley. Who knows who might come racing along. Either that, or the garbage man might scoop us up and take us away. No, garages were just too hazardous for kids.
Dad went along with Grandma’s garage ban. When he went out to the garage to warm up the car and bring it around front, the last thing he wanted was a kid underfoot.
So it wasn’t often I could smell the old garage, hear the boinging springs coil, watch the sun fight its way through the dusty window panes, or feel the coolness emanate from the deteriorating concrete slab on a hot summer day.
Recently, I opened a garage which is only thirty years old. It has an automatic door and no mementos to speak of, yet the smell was still there, and still gave the feeling of entering a forbidden inner sanctum.
Single stall flat-roofed garages that open out onto the back alley are no longer constructed. That means they will eventually go extinct, although it will take a while.
When we finally get down to the last few old garages, nobody will raise a ruckus to save them. Unlike old barns and old churches, old garages have no architectural or historic value.
The only thing valuable and rare about an old garage is the smell — and the vivid memories that smell awakens in the dark and dusty corners of the brain.
Arguing that old garages give off a unique odor probably isn’t enough to get them placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
But before we tear all of the old garages down, I hope some aromatherapy expert can bottle that musty, dusty, nostalgic old garage smell so I can take a snort of it every now and then.