(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.)
Wow, I almost don’t believe it! There are so many others here I feel are clearly more incredible sleuths than I am. I’m grateful for the game and for the amazing community that hits my inbox each week. I’m also trying to remember to take more photos when I’m out and about, since that’s something I’m terrible at. My better half, to her credit, takes photos of everything and has captured many wonderful days of our time.
I recently went to [country redacted] with my brother for our 40th birthday and took tons of photos. Attached is one that might be suitable someday for a contest, but it’s probably just an acceptable photo of [city redacted] from our hostel. It was a surprisingly lovely time there weather-wise, since we were there at the opposite of tourist season, fully expecting rainy weather. Being a Seattleite, you can’t be phased by rain :)
I’ll take the VFYW book as my prize, as I don’t mind at all paying for the subscription; I’m happy to support you and Andrew this way.
We’re both grateful! If you’d like to join him in supporting the Dish, here’s the link — and you’ll be able to read the full contest results every week, including the full Dish newsletter and full podcast. A paid subscriber writes:
Hello and Happy New Year to you! I know it’s the 22nd, but it’s my first submission of the year, so I’m going to still leverage a New Year’s greeting.
I appreciate that greeting much more than Larry David would:
From our super-sleuth in Bethlum:
I want to say that I groaned a bit at your title for last week’s contest, “Tackling What You See.” Sort of a dad joke, I suppose.
And I don’t have the excuse of being a dad. Here’s a dissent over last week’s contest from the super-sleuth in Yakima:
A quick protest: after my pilgrimage down to the light-rail station last week, I can personally attest that your contest winner was not one window off. He nailed it, as did Ann Arbor and Berkeley (and me). So your submitter is mistaken. The clincher is the pattern of narrow, vertical, silver window dividers alternating with wider (silver-black-silver) dividers. The contest view has a narrow silver on the right and a closely cropped wider divider on the left, as do the above entries. The submitter and the Baltimore sleuth have marked a window with the narrow divider on the left.
A even greater victory for our winner, then. Here’s Berkeley with a similar dissent — and visuals:
I wish to report a Chefchaouen incident at SeaTac. Not a full-fledged Chefchaouen. Not the wrong floor, just the wrong window. So a mini-Chefchaouen then.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Unless a view photographer gets someone to stand in the window and wave (like the super-sleuth in Southport did for contest #330, picking out even your own window from the street can be difficult. But using a low-res StreetView image to ID a window after the fact can really be fraught. The contest’s winner and the a-maize-ing sleuth in Ann Arbor (and me) weren’t “one window away.” We were either spot on — or TWO windows away. Here’s the evidence:
As with Chefchaouen, nothing’s at stake except bragging rights. The winner would be the same regardless. But you only get to win this thing once, so it’s always nicer to know you won by guessing the right window, not just one in its vicinity.
A non-dissent followup comes from the Burner sleuth in Seattle, who last week traveled in person to the SeaTac window:
I’m back at the airport, for a short flight to Vancouver to enjoy a week of snowboarding at Whistler. Here’s a very unglamorous view of the light rail (Mt. Rainier is out today but I can’t see it from my current vantage point):
The next followup, of sorts, comes from the super-sleuth in Bethlum. She had Gmail problems last week that blocked her images of public art, so she resends her colorful entry:
I took a pass on the Everett contest, since I realized a while ago that if I don’t start and have a good lead shortly after the VFYW hits my inbox, I never get back to it. But I don’t think I missed too much public art in Everett, although I’m sure there is some (the coffee shop we were looking out from has sponsored art shows in the past). Interestingly, a Google search for public art in Everett, PA turns up little, but instead points me to Everett, WA … which is coincidentally just north of our view this week. As it turns out, I won’t need to travel that far for fun public art.
Unlike Everett, PA, there is an entire webpage devoted to the public art in the Sea-Tac airport. I’ve always loved airport art, so that is where we are walking this week. From our window at the light-rail station, we have a 1,200-foot walk to the terminal (the distance irking some). The hallway is our first introduction to a colorful environment:
Once in the airport, there are at least 65 artworks to find and enjoy — some small and some rather large. For the large, there’s “Boundary” by John Grade. From the artist’s website:
Inspired by an imagined vantage from below the root structure of an old-growth western red cedar, Boundary cantilevers 25 feet from the primary wall that welcomes passengers who enter Seattle-Tacoma Airport’s North Terminal. The sculpture’s undulating radial perimeter references a dividing ground plane at a scale similar to the spread of a commercial aircraft’s wingspan.
The wood used to create this artwork was salvaged from standing dead trees in the Tongass National Forest on Metcalf Island, Alaska. The fabrication of this site-specific installation took over four years, and the installation lasted about five weeks. Alaskan red cedar makes beautiful instrument tops, and this is another lovely use for the wood:
Also in the North Concourse is “Canopy” by Krista Birnbaum. Canopyuses preserved mosses and stylized branch forms to reference the epiphyte-covered tree canopy of Pacific Northwest rainforests. CNC-routed plywood depicts topographic maps, like those found in National Park Visitor Centers:
In the international arrivals facility we find “Chalchiuhtlicue”, a five-part sculpture by Marela Zacharías (the Port of Seattle, which operates the airport, has also invested in indigenous art to “acknowledge the ancestral homelands” upon which the airport is located):
On our way out, if you checked bags, you will see “Eyes on the World,” composed of safety reflectors, by Richard C. Elliott. He changed the name because:
When people at the sign company asked me what it means, I explained that it was inspired by cornhusk baskets from the Plateau Indians along the Columbia. The foreman, who is from Mexico, said they refer to similar double diamond patterns as “The Eyes of God.”
On to this week’s view, here’s the super-sleuth on the UWS:
My immediate thought was “Blarney Castle.” But even though I’ve been there — and kissed the stone! — I know this view is not what its surroundings look like. You’ve done a good job of blurring a variety of clues and throwing in what appears to be a gratuitous Dusty.
Sweet deceased Dusty is never gratuitous! Our super-sleuth in West Orange labels his entry, “College Town, USA” — which is on the right track:
Chris, hello! This would’ve been a fun contest to sink my teeth into, but I flatly ran out of time. (I’m on parental leave with beautiful baby #2, and it’s both wonderful and So. Much. Work.) I’m especially disappointed because this is very likely a college campus, and I have a record to defend of guessing those Views correctly; I think my first win came from one such contest in fact. Alas.
Instead, I’ll just point out that the stone tower in this View has been stuck in my head for the last week. It looks so familiar. Where have I seen it? Turns out it’s a close match for the art on a $300 trading card from Magic: the Gathering:
But I highly doubt this View is of the fictional world of Phyrexia, so that’s no help.
The super-sleuth in Riverwoods — which sounds like a Magic character — runs through more clues:
I chased down the states that don’t require front license plates, only checked the ones that experience autumn, and checked college football fields … and I got nothing. I tried enhancing the text on the bus — not so easy. I wished those twin towers in the distance (skyscrapers?) would have popped up, but nothing.
Looks like a coed school? I feel like its probably a smaller school — D3? I’m not even sure if those are football field lights — maybe a soccer field? The heart in the parking space — is it reserved for Purple Heart recipients?
Man, I’m stumped again. So frustrating. Durham, NC?
Nope. Giuseppe, who circled the right window, confirms that we’re looking at a campus:
Oof, that was hard. The fact that the windows had been blurred out made me drastically misjudge the size of the tower, and therefore its nature: I thought it was a church bell tower. Fortunately, I realized that the place was a university campus, and that led me to finally find the location.
More clues are scrutinized by the super-sleuth in Yakima:
It’s somewhat flat: Midwest, Eastern Seaboard/Piedmont, or Gulf Coast. Red maples and other deciduous trees suggest eastern US.
New England is out, since front license plates are required there. Based on the nondescript blurred colors, I can only eliminate three or four of the no-front-plate states, such as Oklahoma (since the dirt’s not red) and Florida (for lack of a palm tree).
The low-tech stencil on the Wounded Warriors parking spot rules out Canada, since their equivalent of the Purple Heart is the non-purple Sacrifice medal.
On a sign there’s “Game Day” — looks collegiate, but it could be a municipal sports complex:
All colleges I found with blue as a school color — based on the “#1” banner — are dead-ends.
Dusty’s perch looks like a French bulldog with pinnacles and doesn’t appear on any lists of collegiate Gothic towers.
The clump of pedestrians approaching through the trees have matching pants and tops but non-matching shoes, so they look more like a school marching band than a military company:
Is that a white zed with a cross bar on the little green sign by the sidewalk at the left? I can’t decipher the writing and logo on the black-and-white bus/utility vehicle.
In short, I’m stumped. I’m guessing Virginia or North Carolina, only because the variegated-color stone construction is reminiscent of Virginia Tech’s Hokie stone or Duke’s Duke stone. Let’s go with Blacksburg, VA. Looking forward to seeing the masters at work …
Another campus guess: “The picture is of Boston College in Chestnut Hill, MA.” Another goes with “Indiana University campus, Bloomington, IN.” Another: “The location is Washington University in Saint Louis, and I believe it may be Brookings Hall, but it’s hard to tell.” And another:
If I am correct, this is a parking lot at Cornell University, and that’s a tower of Ithaca College on the horizon, waaaaaaay in the distance. Judging by the leaves, though, this would not be Ithaca in January.
Another writes, “No front license plates on the cars, and autumn foliage … I’ll guess Montreal, Canada.” Nope, it’s in the US. A previous winner maps out the license plates:
This one was fairly straightforward — definitely a college in the US on game day. No front license plates, so it’s in one of the yellow states on this map that I found on Wikipedia:
Here’s a guess for a campus in a yellow state:
Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana? Seems fitting, and the view looks an awful lot like the campus!
Our super-sleuth in San Fran, who got the right window, narrows down the US for us:
Thanks for another week of sending me around new parts of the US that I have never visited! I didn’t expect to end this week so far west and south, approximately a thousand miles from my initial guess. At first, I thought that this looked like some university in the Northeast, and the lack of front license plates started me off in Quebec, and then I worked my way south through Michigan and Pennsylvania and then into North Carolina. The Duke campus had so many similarities — the lamp posts, the stone used in the buildings, the tower on the left — but nothing matched. Rhodes College outside Memphis was also close, but not quite.
Our previous winner in Tewksbury also thought Duke at first:
I’m a Duke grad, and it’s hard to explain just how similar this picture looks to where the Duke’s West Campus dorms end and the athletic facilities begin:
Even knowing the vantage point in the picture didn’t properly align with the parking lot, my brain just kept saying I was looking at Duke. The one thing that convinced me it couldn’t be possible was the city skyline in the distance, and that’s actually what helped get me to the correct answer. I know what the Durham skyline looks like ... and it’s not that.
Searching for “gothic style college campuses” was a mess, so I tried searching for “buildings that look like the Twin Towers.” Mixed in among dozens and dozens of pictures of the actual Twin Towers was a picture of what is now known as the “BOK Tower”:
Why does it look so much like the World Trade Center? Apparently because the owner of the project asked the same architect who built the WTC to build him a 1/2 scale model of Tower 1. There you go.
Another notes, “For more than 30 years, the BOK Tower was the tallest building in this state.” The wine geek in San Francisco names the state:
This was indeed a surprising contest. My first take was somewhere around the Great Lakes. Maybe it was the grey sky and the deciduous trees in fall colors, I dunno. It appears the cars don’t have front license plates, so that led to Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But Pennsylvania was recently featured in the contest, so it could be eliminated.
So what the heck to search for? The stone building with the beagle on it seems like the obvious choice. The setting seems like a college campus. The building doesn’t appear to be a church, so maybe a research facility of some kind? A library maybe?
Looking around the Great Lakes got me nowhere, so I was getting pretty disenchanted. Most of the rest of the states were in the South or Southwest, which didn’t fit my preconceptions. Two other Midwestern states were possibilities, but I just couldn’t imagine that the view could be from Kansas or Oklahoma.
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