VFYW: A Glass Pyramid Scheme

For contest #441, we visit a weird, wild, and woolly city.

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Oddly enough, last week was the first time in 440 contests that we featured New Orleans — the city featured on the cover of the VFYW book:

(This week’s location is another major US city we’re featuring for the first time.) Last week’s winner will be receiving the photo book soon:

Wow, this is so cool! If you’d have told me when I started reading the Dish that someday I’d actually win a VFYW, I wouldn’t have believed it.

As much as two years of free Dish is appealing, I really enjoy supporting you and Andrew. The 50 bucks annually (I just renewed) is well worth the investment to support your continued curation of the Dish community. So we will take a copy of the VFYW book, which will get a coveted place alongside my signed copy of Out on a Limb.

On a somber note, if you can please pass along our condolences to Chini on the passing of his stepdad. My dad will have passed away eight years ago next month, and if I can share anything that resembles wisdom: while the grief remains, you do find a way to carry it in spite of its load.

Being the internet connoisseurs that you are, I’m sure you’ve seen this clip of Andrew Garfield talking of his mother with Colbert:

Garfield beautifully explains how he’s coped with his grief and his wrangling of it into something positive — a sentiment I’ve found incredibly helpful in continuing to miss my father (and I hope to always). May Chini (and you and Andrew) find solace in the love that gets sent your way as you grieve. While that love can’t fill the hole that’s left when we’ve lost a loved one, it can act as a balm that fosters the healing that wound needs.

I’m excited/dreading and stockpiling tissues for Andrew’s episode with Anderson Cooper on grief this Friday; I have no doubt it’s going to be a classic. Thank you again for the VFYW contest — and the W this week!

Here’s the latest note of grief from a sleuth:

I hope you’re doing well. You and Andrew are both frequently in my thoughts and prayers. I’m sorry to be absent over the past few weeks. I needed some down time as we’ve had our own death in the family: my 20-year-old nephew died of a fentanyl overdose. It’s just been a bit hard getting back into some routines (although I probably should have kept at VFYW for the sake of diversion).

Our condolences, and thank you. As the Alaskan globetrotter illustrated last month (at the bottom of a write-up that you may have missed), a lot of beauty can come in the wake of tragedy:

I met my Alaskan-Siberian VFYW counterpart, Valya, through an online grieving group after my wife died in early 2021. (Valya also lost her spouse.) A contest view that fall featured a building that looked Stalinesque to me. I had heard her Russian accent and knew she was of a certain age, so I sent her the contest and wondered if she recognized the locale. She mocked my intuition — “that is absolutely not Russia” — but her curiosity took over and she proceeded to solve it (Detroit). Over the next month, while I was using the pretext of the contest to hang out with her in real life, she solved three of the next four views — becoming a VFYW addict as well. 

Detroit, Michigan

Since joining forces, Valya and I are hitting the correct location about 80 percent of the time. Having two minds attack the VFYW from different cultural backgrounds, travel histories, and tech skills is a recipe for success — and a fine way to become acquainted. Our mutual love of travel and geography, among other things, eventually led to this and that, and we are now living together — and dutifully playing the contest that connected us each week.

That’s one of my all-time favorite stories of the VFYW. Next up, the CO/NJ super-champ has a followup for last week’s write-up:

There were several accounts from the sleuths of the wonderful food in New Orleans, which holds a special place in my heart because of its association with my mother, who passed away almost 20 years ago. She was a wonderful and adventurous cook. I caught the cooking bug from her at an early age and it became a passion we shared and bonded over.

I remember one of her favorite cook books was Brennan’s New Orleans Cookbook, which she got at the restaurant when she visited there with my dad shortly after they married. She frequently spoke of that visit as one of the best dining experiences of her life. The cookbook features a recipe for one of the first truly gourmet dishes I ever tried to make: Bananas Foster. It’s a simple but impressive dish, and I returned to it time and again over the years, including making it for my future wife on one of our first dates.

I reciprocated with a gift of creole cooking when I gave my mom a copy of one of my own favorite cookbooks, Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen. The recipe for Paneed Rabbit and Fettuccine became one of her go-tos. When my wife and I visited New Orleans together for the first time 30 years ago, while we were in vet school, we made pilgrimages to both Brennan’s and K-Paul. Both were wonderful.

Another followup:

Aww thanks for posting my update — and adding the link to Oscar Mike site! The compound near O’Hare they’re raising money for will serve many more athletes. I’m sure a generous sleuth or two will see fit to help out.

It was, as always, an amazing event. They have a killer videographer, and every year we get to watch clips of their crazy stunts. (They’ve added Spartan Races this year!) One of the members of their “murderball” team — what they call wheelchair rugby — Mason Symons, was actually a silver medalist at the Paralympic Games in Paris this past summer. I got to hold the medal — it’s so heavy!

If you’re into inspiring stories, you can watch a film about their team, Murderball:

Heroes is an overused word, but these men and women qualify easily.

Here’s one more followup, from the UWS super-sleuth:

Last week’s New Orleans view (a wild-ass guess, so I didn’t add any stories) brought up a good memory. My husband lived in NOLA from the age of 3-6, when his father was the Orthodox Jewish rabbi for the city. At that time, the shul — Congregation Beth Israel — was the oldest Orthodox congregation in the NOLA area. The building — designed by a noted local architect, Emile Weil — is less than a mile away from our view, down Carondelet St.

Just before lockdown in 2020, we changed a planned vacation to Italy (where COVID was spreading rapidly) to instead visit NOLA (where it was also spreading rapid, but unbeknownst to us). We decided to go see the building where that shul had been. The Orthodox congregation moved to the suburbs years ago, and the building now belongs to a Baptist church — part of the New Home Family Worship Center.

We wanted to take a peek inside this beautiful building, but there was a fund-raising event in progress. But they invited us in anyway, and we had a delightful conversation with the “first lady” of the church. We were struck by the beauty of the building, inside and out, and amazed that they kept the symbols of Judaism on the outside of the building:

You can see Stars of David, the 10 Commandments, and a menorah. Wild!

We went back to NOLA in 2022; it’s how we book-ended the pandemic. Last week’s write-up makes me want to head down there again. The food! The music! Thanks for a great challenge this week, and a nice memory!  

Like that sleuth, I was also in NOLA just before the lockdown, passing through with my Airstream. On to this week’s view, here’s the super-sleuth in Brookline:

What a difference a week makes, both in political outlook and in VFYW difficulty. Folks here in the blue bubble of Brookline are pretty bummed — probably much more for the former reason than the latter, but I feel bereft on both fronts.

This week I chased several wild geese without anything to show for it. I browsed places in the US with red bus/bike lanes and tactile paving, but nothing really clicked. I thought that the ornate street lamps could be a clue, so I looked at similar examples from Los Angeles to San Diego to El Paso to Chicago to DC to various other places — without luck. The closest I came was this lighting product sold by Acuity Brands based in Georgia:

But that didn’t really help, as these lamps seem to be used in various places across the country.

I also thought that identifying the graphics on the U-Haul van might provide a hint:

But just because that is the Arkansas graphic doesn’t mean that the van is anywhere near that state. And since all the other cars seem to have front and rear license plates, that would eliminate Arkansas (a rear-plate-only state), per Wikipedia.

I hoped that this tantalizing peek through the leaves was some sort of parking kiosk:

But no hits for that either. So I’ve got nothing. Taking into account red bus lanes, front and rear license plates, warm-looking climate, funky modern architecture, tree-covered hills in the distance, etc., I’ll guess Austin, TX. But since we just had the contest in Texas, it’s unlikely that we'd come back to the same state so soon.

Hope my fellow sleuths have better luck!

Here’s another guess for Texas:

This one was frustrating. It’s clearly the US, but there’s nothing very unique about the buildings. The one thing that gave me hope was that if you drew a Venn diagram of “states with front license plates” and “growing range of wisteria and southern magnolias” (magnolia by the front entrance to the hotel and wisteria on the trellises), you’d actually get very little overlap — basically Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Texas.

Surely you wouldn’t be back in PA so soon after two VFYWs in recent memory.  And I doubt MD even has a building that large. It didn’t look like VA to me, which is where I live, so I went with TX and looked for glass pyramid-like structures like that one that seems to be peeking out from the large building. There’s a glass pyramid in Dallas and several in Galveston, but they didn’t work. So I’m just guessing Houston, mostly randomly. 

Another state:

Outside of it being in the USA, I have no frigging idea! There’s a blue-and-white sign on the street that I can’t read, in front of college-dorm-looking apartment buildings. And a U-Haul in a hotel parking lot perhaps signals an overnighting parent soon driving back home after lugging a freshman and their crap to said dorm. And there’s an hulking ugly new building (admin? conference center?) mostly obscuring some fancy glass atrium on the other side, which no half-hour of googling can unearth.

So, I’m just gonna cry uncle and guess extravagantly. Penn State’s colors are blue and white, and it’s got a slightly run-down Northeastern town vibe, so I’m going with Wilkes-Barre, PA.

And another state:

California. But kind of a shitty part of California? That’s all I got.

Chini got more:

From the beginning of the entry from the wine geek in San Fran:

I’ll be curious to see what degree of difficulty this VFYW generates. At first, I was feeling pretty lost and hopeless, which made no sense to me because the scenery and architecture and trees all seemed to look so familiar — or maybe just common. The UHaul, the street signage, and the pedestrians in tee shirts and shorts suggested we were in the US somewhere not too cold and not too hot. The yellow brick confused me a bit, suggesting somewhere mid-Atlantic, but the buildings we see appear too modern for that area.

Somehow I zeroed in on the Pacific Northwest, principally Seattle, and kept looking for buildings with that fairly unique combination of yellow brick, offset fascia panels, white and grey, modern design, etc. There seem to be a lot of these types of buildings in Seattle, but nothing was matching up.

It’s indeed the PNW. He eventually got to the right city, but the super-sleuth in Bend stuck with Seattle:

I really don’t know where this is, but the cars and license plates suggest the US, and that looks like a magnolia tree at the left edge. If so, then it is either somewhere along the southern tier of the US or along the Pacific coast — somewhere that doesn’t get too cold. That’s a large area.

At the risk of ending up way up high in your write-up, I’m going to guess Seattle — based on a weak, indistinct, ethereal vibe. I suspect I’ll be within ~2,500 miles. 

Indeed! Less than 200 miles, in fact. “An amateur sleuth-in-training” names the right city: