THAT SMELL.(The Talk of the Town)(New York City smelled of maple syrup)

It's a well-known fact, among real-estate agents, that prospective buyers respond enthusiastically to the smells of cinnamon and baking dough. Brokers often instruct sellers to put an apple pie in the oven just before showing an apartment. This ploy came to mind last Thursday evening, when the smell of maple syrup unaccountably permeated the entire metropolitan area. Reports came in from Harlem to Hackensack, from Greenpoint to Greenwich Village, that the air smelled sweet. By morning, with plausible explanations in short supply, elaborate theories had begun to take shape--everything from bioterrorism of some kind to "Eggoterrorism," as someone wrote on the blog Gothamist. So, the real-estate hypothesis: Recently, the market has cooled off. Perhaps, in a collective stroke of capitulation, the city's legions of frustrated sellers decided to try the pie trick, except that, because of a seasonal glut of maple products from New England, they chose to make hotcakes instead. According to this premise, when a real-estate bubble bursts, it smells like syrup.

Then, there was the peak-foliage theory, which took into account the fact that the wind that evening was coming from the northwest--out of the highlands of New York and New Jersey, where the maples have been shedding their leaves. Could all those trees, amid autumnal rot, somehow emit the scent of Aunt Jemima? "No," said Sumner Dole, a forester at the University of New Hampshire. "There's absolutely nothing with respect to the tree that would give you that smell. Something might've got into the atmosphere and you might have had an ...