(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.)
Next week is the 500th installment of the VFYW contest. If you’d like to share your favorite moment of the contest from years past, please send it in. But please make it concise; the avalanche of words sent every week is overwhelming already, and I’d like to include as many great memories as I can.
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
An architect who stuffs his buildings with overflowing greenery
A statue of the Virgin Mary said to have shed a single tear
Wow! Thank you! I’m surprised. I figured there would be a lot of people getting this one right. I’ll take the free subscription please.
Our super-sleuth on the UWS follows up:
Kudos on the write-up from last week! OK, it was NYC and maybe I’m biased, but I thought it was one of the all-time best. You listed your highlights, but I have my Top 3:
San Mateo made a scatter plot of buildings with the address 333? ... and somehow located the one in our View? ... AND reimagined the building? This sleuth continues to blow me away.
Steam under the streets of Manhattan — a lot of new and fascinating info for me. Coincidentally, my husband and I have tickets for a seminar tomorrow night, with the topic being the project to map everything under NYC streets. We’re going to hear about everything going on down there, including steam. And where does this seminar take place? At 333 W 23rd St. Cue Twilight Zone music!
You spent time living in NYC — who knew? Now I like you even more.
Blush. Next up is the South Jersey sleuth who had a reunion show at the Bitter End rock venue, which is near last week’s window:
I’m back from my reunion show in NYC (which was a blast), and it now appears to be spring. I’m no scientist, but I know enough about basic causality to understand that my show appears to be responsible for that. So, you know, you’re welcome.
But the spring weather didn’t last — at least in the nation’s capital:
Greetings from an unseasonably warm DC. As I write this email, the temperature outside is 84 degrees, surpassing yesterday’s record-setting 83. Unfortunately, winter comes roaring back tomorrow, with SNOW predicted in the afternoon. It’s insane!
Bring back spring! Another followup comes from our super-sleuth in Sagaponack:
Reading through last week’s submissions reminded me of two favorite NYC reimagining pieces. (Maybe some of the history buffs in the Dish crowd will enjoy them.) I recently saw this fun animation on Instagram: “2000 Years of Manhattan in 36 Seconds.” And I thought this TED talk showing what “Mannahatta” looked like pre-NYC was great:
He also sends a gut-punch of an email:
I hope things on your end have improved. This was a tough week for us. We had really hoped that the new puppy I featured in last week’s contest would have ample playtime with our 15-year-old poodle, but it wasn’t meant to be. He passed away on Friday and we are devastated.
The dog lords giveth and they taketh away. As you and Andrew know, dogs fill your heart and then break it. My poodle had a huge personality and leaves a big hole in our lives.
Andrew (and me as a dog uncle) still have a hole in our hearts over the loss of Bowie. Big condolences to our friend in Sagaponack.
On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Yakima writes:
French ornamentation, European-style license plates, and an over-representation of motorbikes. That didn’t lead me to the solution, but at least that makes the solution plausible.
But he ended up very close to the right window. For our super-sleuth in Shiprock, not so much:
Panama City, Panama? I went there for a wedding once, many years ago. Kinda looks like that.
A first-time sleuth gets to the right region: “I think this is somewhere in Hong Kong — either Central or near the west side of the island.” Chini knows the right place:
Our super-sleuth in Malvern squints at the billboard in view:
So here we are about to Spring Forward and I’m up at 1am/2am trying to figure out which window in a choice of a zillion. The city was a lucky guess, from the giant poster (?) hanging at the top-right; the words in big letters at the bottom were a good bet for “Hour Glass,” and squinting at the letters underneath suggested “[city redacted].” Googling the words and the city gave a clear hit: web links to a watch store.
However, looking on Google Maps around the address of the store was fruitless. But the parked bikes in the foreground, the trees, and the general vibes were further confirmation that the city was right.
Then there was another small detail that unlocked the puzzle: the small minarets above the roof, center-left. Then searching for “minarets [city redacted]” took me right to the [redacted] Central Mosque, and the very first photo of that shows the minarets and what has to be the backside of the brown and cream building in the top right quarter of our view.
Here’s what that mosque looks like:
Our super-sleuth in Berkeley points to another key clue:
I didn’t have a lot of time for VFYW this week, so I won’t spend a lot of time explaining how I got here. Suffice to say the vital clue turned out to be the red Ă in the signage on the wall that’s mostly hidden by the tree. Wikipedia tells me the alphabet being used could be Latin, Southern Berber, Celtic British, Romanian, or [redacted], so I went for [redacted] — and not just because of all those parked motorbikes, but they weren’t a bad indicator either.
Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, observes many clues:
A sign written in the Latin alphabet. A giant English-language billboard. A mosque. A building with European architecture. A seemingly tropical or subtropical climate. A few decorative motifs hinting at South or Southeast Asia. We could give all these clues equal weight and conclude that we are looking at an English-speaking Muslim country in tropical Asia with a colonial heritage: Malaysia, that is, or maybe some parts of the Philippines. But we are not in either of these countries.
Clearly, not all of those clues carry the same weight. English is used because of its prestige even in countries where it is spoken very little, while mosques are also found in countries with very few Muslims — the mosque in our photo is actually quite small. But now the search area has become much broader … until you squint a little and realize that one of the letters on that sign is an Ă. Suddenly, the possibilities collapse to just one country.
The A2 Team names it:
This was an interesting contest, but also ultimately surprisingly easy.
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