(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.)
Some highlights from this week’s writeup:
An especially impressive meal from our resident chef.
Swifts and Swifties.
The tragic death of a princess — was she poisoned?
Decapitations.
Many tourist reports from sleuths who loved this city.
Here’s a followup from a previous winner in Oakland:
The submitter of last week’s window describes a trip “visiting WPA murals that are in Post Offices,” and notes, “We saw this one during our roundabout trip [from Eau Claire] to Milwaukee — some Grant Wood going on here”:
That particular mural is certainly emblematic of Wood’s style, so I tried googling “Grant Wood WPA murals” and came across this summary:
Grant Wood created two prominent murals for Iowa State University under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a Depression-era federal art program. These murals, ‘When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow’ (1934) and ‘Breaking the Prairie’ (1936–37), were designed by Wood and executed by other artists to promote the theme of agriculture’s importance to American society.... Wood was the PWAP state director for Iowa, playing a key role in facilitating these and other New Deal art projects.
Evidently the relationship was complex! I wish I had the time to explore this further, but I need to leave that rabbit-hole behind for now. I’m preoccupied with planning a major trip of my own — but I won’t reveal the destination(s) here, since I hope to take some provocative window snapshots along the way. ;-)
Another sleuth adds:
Please let your submitter know: if they love post office murals, they can also come north! In Iron Mountain we have some beautiful examples of the genre, including:
We are about three hours north of Eau Claire, but if they ever make it up here, they should check it out. I’d be happy to buy them a beer on the rooftop terrace!
On to this week’s view, here’s Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:
Whenever I recognize a city in the VFYW contest with certainty, I try to pinpoint the exact location where the photo was taken by looking at a satellite image. It’s more fun than Googling (which can be stultifying at times), and you may discover interesting places by chance. I did this for contest #296 in NYC, and again for this week’s city — which is truly unmistakable, unlike too many places in this world.
Our super-sleuth in Yakima points to the most glaring clue:
The blue flag by the buses is the flag of the European Union:
Narrowing it down to four EU countries is our super-sleuth in Noumea:
I’m on an extended vacation, so no time to investigate this week’s window, but a quick glance suggests that, once again, my attempt to send you a contest photo has been preempted by another person with a better photo (similar to the Palau contest earlier this year). My wife and I are on a two-month tour of Europe, thus far traveling Paris-Budapest-Prague-Vienna, and I feel pretty certain that this week’s photo comes from one of those cities.
But I have no time to dig deeper since we are, you know, doing vacation things. Sadly, one of those things is trying to recover from the theft of my backpack (on Day 2 of a 60-day trip) from our Airbnb in Budapest: passport, wallet (with credit/debit cards/driver’s license), work laptop, etc. It took 10 days to get a new passport in Budapest (I could travel around the Schengen area with an emergency one while awaiting a real passport), but dealing with cash and credit lines has been exhaustingly time consuming. And we lost out on a Morocco side trip.
Anyway, in case I’m way off about the location, I’ve attached views from our Airbnb places in Budapest/Vienna/Prague just in case. None are that great, but with proper cropping and beagle-masking, maybe one is usable.
Here’s his view that looks most similar to this week’s view:
Our super-sleuth in San Mateo:
The most important elements of the VFYW are what are *not* there. First, we don’t have the missing words on the obfuscated red banner (Billetterie Richelieu) across the street to the right. Then there’s the obviously intentional decision by the VFYW photographer to exclude the famous and very recognizable Opéra Garnier. Had it been included, it would have made solving the contest way too easy.
So, for this week’s Reimagined, my first change is to reorient our view directly down Avenue de l’Opéra toward the Opéra Garnier. And given my own experience of a private tour of the Louvre, and an especially long visit with the Mona Lisa, I’m going to imagine how Leonardo da Vinci might have Reimagined the VFYW:
Hue — one-half of the married team in Falcon Heights — writes:
Deb looked at the picture and said, “Oh, I’ve been there!” Apparently everyone with culture has been there, but I have not. Here she is:
That yellow brick building with the columns on the ground floor on the right-hand side of the pic is, of course, the Salle Richelieu, 1 Place Colette, 75001 Paris, France. It is the principal theatre of the Comédie-Française, located in the Palais-Royal in the first arrondissement of Paris. I think the pic was taken from [hotel redacted], on the corner of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue de Richelieu. The view is above the treetops, so I think might be taken from the topmost yellow brick floor.
And I say, yes, the top floor, but not the curved part, but the tan level. Because I had a browser upgrade go terribly awry this week, I cannot include a picture, so let’s just say third window from the left and then daydream of visiting the place someday.
Paris it is. From the Brookline super-sleuth:
The view this week is so unabashedly Parisian that my brain cells are threatening to go on strike. Is it by Francophone toponymic association that we’ve jumped from Fond du Lac last week to Île-de-France this week? Fondness for le fromage? In any event, it’s sure to be a crowd-pleasing contest with many stories.
I squinted hard at the bus in the photo and decided that its route number ended in “-1” and was headed to a two-word destination (4-5 letters + 7-8 letters). I studied a map of Paris bus lines and settled on route 21 bound for Stade Charléty — the only route number ending in “-1” that had a two-word destination of the correct length.
But since the bus travels through many of the central areas of the city, I needed more to nail down the location.
The blurred lettering on the building across from the VFYW spot is the sign of the Comédie-Française, where my late wife (who spent her junior year in Paris as a French major) enjoyed watching several performances of Molière’s plays. Alas, we visited only once together some 25 years ago, so otherwise my knowledge of the city is limited.
The Comédie-Française was the key detail for the Intrepid Couch Traveler:
It’s not often that a VFYW screams its location at me, and even rarer that my instinct is correct. I immediately thought of Paris and hunted down the location based on the fact that the building on the right looks suspiciously like the working end of a theater or opera house:
It is, in fact, the Comédie-Française. I attribute my sudden recognition not to my junior-high summer trip to Paris so many years ago, but rather to my not-at-all-embarrassing-why-would-you-even-think-that addiction to Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. It was the movie’s accurate recreations of the Paris streetscape in this not-at-all-only-for-kids animated masterpiece that I am not all all embarrassed to have watched as a somewhat beyond middle-aged man that did it:
I ran out of time to select the window this week. But I did have time to find the lovely couches in the [hotel’s bar]:
More on the Comédie-Française comes from this sleuth:
I’m not a super-sleuth — perhaps I’m not even deserving of the title “sleuth” yet — but I’m starting to catch the VFYW bug. Maybe I’ll be the “South Carolina super-sleuth” one day.
In my undergraduate years, I was a vocal performance major, sang two pieces from Charles Gounod’s Faust in my senior recital, and lived to tell the tale. I say this because I deeply love the arts — both in the preservation of their history and the voice they give to the coming culture. Here’s what’s genuinely unique about the Comédie-Française: it’s the only national theatre with a permanent troupe. It maintains ~60 full-time actors, which is a rarity worldwide for a state theatre. They have a continuous lineage (founded in 1680) and a “Maison de Molière” identity. It’s one of the world’s oldest still-active troupes and a custodian of the French classical canon in the very heart of the Louvre/Palais-Royal quarter.
Here’s the aerial view from Chini:
Here’s the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor:
The photo shouts two things immediately: (1) it’s Paris, and (2) You are daring us to find the window. Here is a generic guess:
From a previous winner:
It looks like a view from a window on the Rue de Rivoli side of the Louvre. Too long since I’ve been there, alas.
Another sleuth guesses simply, “Intercon Hotel at the intersection of rue de Rivoli and av de l’Opera, Paris, France.” From our super-sleuth in Yakima:
This week’s view looks like France to me, and after I had double-checked a few other French towns, it was almost certainly Paris. I had a couple of viable search strategies. One was to systematically search the Paris street map until I found two fountains in close proximity to each other like those in the middle of the view, like this:
I didn’t quite have the patience for this, but I’m sure it would have worked.
His other strategy got him to the right hotel. A newcomer names it:
I’m a 20-year follower of the Dish but a first-time contestant here, if you can believe it. I was just in Paris for the first time in my life a couple of months ago, so I immediately knew where in the world this photo was taken. Finding the exact location was a little bit more difficult, but the two fountains opposing each other — one on a triangular square and on what seemed like a pretty central location — narrowed down the search considerably.
The two fountains are Fontaine de la Nymphe marine on the left, and Fountain of Theatre Francais on the right.
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