SMELL: Hot & Crusty Bakery, 4 pm, Grand Central Terminal

My earliest memories of the iconic New York City bakery smell are of Lichtman’s, a Jewish-Hungarian bakery on Amsterdam and West Eighty-sixth Street that closed in the 1980s. When my family visited my grandparents, who lived half a block away, we would often stop in for cookies (after picking up roast-beef sandwiches at nearby Barney Greengrass, which has its own iconic New York smell of sawdust, fish, salt, and pickle brine). I remember discovering that Lichtman’s crescent-shaped butter cookies fit perfectly into the cutout in the backs of my grandparents’ wooden kitchen chairs.

I was delighted to discover a modern incarnation of this scent right before rush hour, in Grand Central Terminal, just past the doors to the Times Square shuttle-train platform. The aroma emanated from New York’s bakery mini-chain Hot & Crusty, which has a small outpost there, a few steps from Zaro’s blockbuster corner store. As it turns out, a batch of the bakery's bread comes out of the oven around this time each day.

Grand Central has its own signature smell, of course, most intense as you approach the tracks: warm, stale, fan-blown air; mechanics’ oil; and hot metal mixed with a musk of floor cleaner and dank mop-swishings. But the Hot & Crusty smell quickly subsumes these waftings of the station’s underbelly with hot poppy and sesame seeds, caramelized sugar, onion, pepper, warm crust, and yeast. Inside the glass case, black-and-white and chocolate-drop cookies gently melt onto sheets of wax paper alongside rows of cake slices in plastic sleeves, gleaming orbs of egg-glazed challah, curls of rugelach, plump hamantashen, sugar-dusted cinnamon pretzels, linzer tarts as brazen as valentines, and golden palmiers with spiraling lobes, not to mention the shelves of loaves—rye, semolina, poppy. Perhaps it’s Hot & Crusty’s (and Lichtman’s) distinctly New York selection of baked goods (with Jewish leanings) that accounts for the “iconic” aroma.

On a recent Friday at dusk, I noticed passersby turning their heads as they caught the scent of the bakery. Some drifted toward it, lingering on the outskirts, then stepped into its fluorescent halo and emerged with a wax-paper bag. One businessman bit furtively into an enormous chocolate-chip muffin, glanced around, shoved it back into the bag, and dashed away with the bag mittened over his fist, leaving a trail of brown crumbs. I remembered how torn I had felt as a child between eating the cookies straight out of the bag on the sidewalk and bringing them home to delight in their perfect fit.

TASTE: McSorley’s Old Ale House cracker-and-cheese plate

This is a place where afternoon slips as easily into evening as the beer slips down the throats of its patrons. Dectets of mugs thunk down on the wooden tables from the fist of a smocked waiter. Beneath the clutter of picture frames and Christmas lights, glasses raised above the brims of baseball caps smash together. There are only two kinds of beer here: dark and light, not too different, and served in five-gulp portions.

This is a place to drink fast and drink long, a place so caught in the past that it’s easy to forget about passing time. But you need something to sustain yourself against all that beer and camaraderie, against the fading of the day. Forget the hamburger and respect the last part of the bar’s oft-cited former motto: “Good Ale, No Ladies, and Raw Onions.” The only thing to order here is the cracker-and-cheese plate.

It’s not much to look at: an unopened sleeve of saltines, a few slabs of cheddar sliced from a brick, curls of raw onion, and wedges of wan beefsteak tomato. Alongside arrives a flip-top bowl of horseradish mustard outfitted with a wooden tongue depressor. The idea is to slap a slice of cheddar onto a saltine, smear on a dab of horseradish, and drape it with a wisp of onion and a bit of tomato. Then raise the tower to your beer-foam-laced lips and bite.

First comes the dry crumble of cracker and crackle of salt crystals sticking to your tongue. Then a mitigating layer of rubbery, forgiving cheese. But almost before you can taste it there’s a punch of horseradish searing its way through everything else. The raw onion kicks in next with an oily stab, followed by a soothing spurt of tomato: a crunch of rind, a cool ooze of seedy pulp. Finally, a slurp (or mug) of beer to wash it all down and cleanse the palate for the next creamy, salty, tangy, spicy, sharp, soothing bite. There’s a combination and flavor for the mood of each passing hour: from the barbaric yawps of midday to the soulful ponderings of early evening.

The fading sun has left warm patches on the sawdust-strewn floor; the beer has left a filigree of foam on another round of just-emptied glasses. The cracker sleeve has been hollowed; there’s horseradish on both ends of the paddle. As Dylan Thomas put it, “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Sensory Deprivation Tank

For the new year, I decided to cleanse my city senses by spending an hour in a sensory deprivation tank: basically, a large, soundproof, lightproof closet containing a bathtub in which one thousand pounds of Epsom salts have been dissolved in skin-temperature water. Once immersed, you float weightlessly, escaping from almost all sensory input. There is nothing to process apart from your thoughts, and even those, like your own physicality, dissolve.

Blue Light Flotation, the oldest flotation center in New York City, is located behind an unmarked door in a residential building in the Flatiron District, and shares its immaculate space with its hale, middle-aged proprietor Sam Zeiger’s living quarters. After debriefing me on the finer points of flotation in his living room, whose shelves are lined with Buddhist self-help books, Sam pulls out a wooden screen to separate my end of the apartment from his. I take a shower with special soaps that won’t taint the water, then tiptoe past his kitchen to the float room. I pull back the door to the tank and, as instructed, lower myself into the water slowly, to reduce water motion. After I’ve reclined, I hit the light switch and am immersed in darkness almost as buoyant as the bathwater. I can’t tell where the surface ends and the space above begins.

The saltwater, which feels more viscous than regular bathwater, immediately brings all my bodily imperfections to the foreground: my senses actually become more acute. Tiny cuts, scratches, and tight muscles throb and tingle. I can hear a hum in my ears and some sort of grinding (is that my mind?). It takes a while for the waves to subside and for me to trust the water to support the weight of my head.

Eventually, though, I relax into stillness. In fact, I hardly move for the duration of the hour. The edges of my body began to melt; after about ten minutes, I feel like I’m lying on a Tempur-Pedic mattress, supported by a depression perfectly conforming to my body’s contours. When I experimentally wiggle a finger under water, I am reassured to find it is still there. It’s so dark I have to blink to figure out if my eyes are closed or open. There is a faint smell of humid chlorine (though I had thought the only antibacterial agent in the water was salt), and I detect a muffled thumping overhead, which I’m able to ignore. There’s no taste (I decide against tasting the saltwater for fear of creating more disruptive waves). After about half an hour (though I’ve lost track of time), I feel like I am levitating, and my thoughts have been lulled. The only time I am aware of my senses is when I swallow.

Out on Twenty-third Street, the city itself seems revived: gyro carts, the graceful thrust of the Flatiron Building, my wet hair turning crisp in the cold air, erhu players on the subway platform. I discretely lick my hand, and the salty taste is a wink of acknowledgment: job done.

SMELL: Sidewalk Christmas-tree stands

Few things make me happier at holiday time than, in the midst of my frenzied errands, passing through a sidewalk Christmas-tree stall and being enveloped for a few moments in the tingly, prickly, resinous redolence of a pine forest.

Vendors—many seasonal immigrants from Europe and Canada—make the stalls their own despite the similarity of their wares. There are seats made from folding chairs or upturned buckets; sawhorse footrests; shelters ranging from plywood-and-tarp lean-tos to heated RVs parked curbside; ornaments as elaborate as inflatable Santa Clauses and carols fizzling from a portable tape deck to a simple string of lights; and offerings from just trees to handcrafts fashioned by the vendors themselves: twig reindeer, candleholders made of tree stumps, homemade ornaments, even the obligatory menorah.

Every stand has the magical steel tree-wrapper, which cloaks the tree in a straitjacket of nylon mesh for its trip home on woolen shoulders or on the roof of a car or alongside red-cheeked children in a little red wagon. At night, and even sometimes during the day, strands of Christmas lights glow from street corners, and the red bows of wreaths hang from chain-link fences alongside tables of tinsel icicles, spray snow, simple tree balls and tree-top stars, small potted fir trees and poinsettias, Santa hats, boxes of lights, and, of course, tree-disposal bags (despite a prohibition from the Department of Sanitation).

During one of the most crowded and frantic seasons in the city, these momentary, fragrant winter wonderlands—just a few squares of city sidewalk--offer a welcome respite.