(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.)
This is the best news to begin the day with! Please send the book to [address in Sweden]. Thank you!
The super-sleuth in Milwaukee — our resident biologist — continues a conversation from last week:
Thanks for the really interesting cross-talk in the last VFYW! Fascinating stuff about the ciliary muscle. That rabbit hole goes even deeper with birds, because it turns out their ciliary muscles are divided into separate muscle bundles pulling in different directions, whose development varies between different species and lifestyles. Here’s a diagram of the edge of a chick’s lens:
The posterior ciliary muscles are the ones I was referring to in my writeup (at a time when I didn’t know the muscle was subdivided). They can pull the lens edge forward toward the scleral ossicles and are better developed in aquatic birds. What I hadn’t found out was that the circumferential iris muscles can also change lens shape, and are regarded as more important. When those contract, it will be like closing a drawstring, pulling the edge of the lens inwards and allowing the lens to bulge forward. And those muscles, as well, are better developed in aquatic birds!
Thanks for geeking out on this cool stuff with me. I also loved seeing the phalluses. I had thought they would be stinkhorn mushrooms, but instead they are a plant I have in my garden — gifted to me by a Methodist church lady, no less. I’ll get some fun out of this.
Another followup:
Regarding the 200-meter “world’s shortest ferry” claim made by one of your sleuths last week:
PortsToronto operates a vehicle and passenger ferry from Eireann Quay at the foot of Bathurst Street to the island airport every 15 minutes during airport operating hours. The ferry is free of charge for pedestrians, but as of 2022, there is a $14 fee for vehicles. The ferry trip is 121 metres (397 ft) long and takes 90 seconds.
There are also some short-run ferries in Vancouver BC.
This Internet item I stumbled upon this week will appeal to a lot of you sleuths:
Neal Agarwal of Neal.fun created the “Internet Roadtrip,” an ingenious collaborative online driving simulator where players vote on direction and radio music every ten seconds. The car moves very slowly, but gets to an agreed upon location eventually.
On to this week’s view, the super-sleuth on Park Avenue writes:
This one was tricky. I see flat suburban countryside with lots of trees — kind of anywhere. The view from McLean VA office buildings sprang to mind. Doesn’t look Deep South or Southwest. So Northeast and Midwest, which doesn’t help much. Pretty generic photo — no recognizable landmarks.
Here’s the super-sleuth in Sidney:
Very tricky! This one took a while for a few reasons: (1) there are about seven million Bank of America branches; (2) there are about eight million glass-mirror, low-rise buildings in the USA; (3) the red plumber’s van is just obscured enough to make it impossible to narrow it down; and (4) the rest of the landscape is about as generic as it gets.
Here’s a view of the generic place from Chini:
Another guesses simply, “Salt Lake City, Utah?” Our super-sleuth in Chicagoland was frustrated at first:
So this turned out to be a bit of searching for a needle in the haystack. I first flipped the image and tried to find the plumber matching the phone number on the truck, but either I didn’t transcribe the phone number correctly, or my search engine decided that nobody on the planet would ever search for a plumber that wasn’t within 20 miles of their IP address, because it simply returned to local plumbers no matter how I tried to modify the search criteria.
He eventually got there. Naming the right part of the US is the super-sleuth in Albany:
This looks to be a Bank of America regional corporate office, located in a very flat, green terrain. So it’s the Midwest/Plains, in an area not too populous but not too desolate. The Bank of America turned out to be a red herring, as you know. I just couldn’t find any BofA locations big enough to be corporate office/regional HQ in the Midwest. They were all small local branches in more populated areas.
Switching gears, I decided to focus on what was happening in the background. It looked like a shopping mall in the process of being demolished. Searching for “recently demolished shipping mall” led me straight to the most promising lead, but there was no Bank of America nearby. What gives?
Oh, but the tricksy hand of VFYW has been holding on to a secret! Because — depending on where/when you drop in via Google Street View — the mirrored building only has BofA signage in the June 2023 Street View, along with a “For Lease” sign.
She got to the right place eventually. So did the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
I’m very curious: how old is this photo? Have you gone back to the archive and dug up some mischievously outdated photo? Street View offers images between 2012 and 2018, and they all show a branch of Merrill Lynch where the VFYW has Bank of America. Current Google Maps and Apple Maps have all kinds of businesses in this location, but not BoA. Yes, I know they can be behind the curve, but not that much.
Images sent by Brookline: Merrill Lynch in June 2015, and BoA in Aug 2021
With not much more than a vague Midwest vibe and front license plates (the plumber’s van didn’t help), the only strategy we could think of is searching for Bank of America offices, state by state. Nothing.
To answer A2’s initial question, the EXIF data in the photo says it was taken on May 9, 2025. Here’s a guess from the super-sleuth on the UWS:
Oy, from bad to worse! Last week I abandoned Stockholm (correct) in favor of Finland (incorrect). This week I find myself submitting an under-the-wire answer that serves one purpose only: to keep my 2025 record of every-week submissions going. I struggled to read the writing on that red truck, finally deciding that it says “Big Plumbing Company.” Not helpful, and probably also wrong.
My guess is Sioux City, Iowa — for the not-win.
Our super-sleuth in Yakima titles his entry, “Omaha Don’t Nebrask me”:
You’ve stumped me. It’s relatively flat (Midwest?), mostly deciduous with one lonely conifer, front license plates and some rear license plates optional, road grid not aligned with our view building, slightly higher proportion of quonset-hut type buildings than normal (hangars?), and strange hobbit apartments with chemical refinery attachments:
The obvious choice searches (“Bank of America office building Nebraska, Minnesota, North Carolina, Canada, Thailand” etc) go nowhere. It’s impossible to get search engines to count floors (“12-story building”) or identify square window grids. Short shadows are about a quarter the height of the objects casting them, and if the photo was taken, say, 1-1/2 weeks ago at noon, that would put us about 40 degrees north, further south if not at high noon.
Maybe someone will recognize the blue and pink logo on the silver truck hood:
At this point, a chance yellow shape triggered bad VFYW memories of Dollar General stores and I had to give up:
Once again I’m looking forward to the methods of the masters.
A sleuth on the Correct Guesser list (who hasn’t yet broken a tie for the prize) names the right metropolitan area:
This damn game is diabolical. Normally I only chase these if it looks like somewhere I’ve been, or I have a head start on the field. The occasions I find the window are almost exclusively in the mountain west of the USA — somewhere we have been bicycling, and when the photo contains a landmark I recognize. This week I fell into the trap of trying to chase just from a vague sense that it shouldn’t be hard to find.
So — sure looks like Texas. High sun with short shadow, and pancake flat with vegetation that could be suburbs of Dallas. I lost an hour looking for BofA buildings in suburban areas in Texas. How about Oklahoma and Kansas? More time wasted.
Oh, look at the van in the reflection and it has a phone number (with no area code) and I can kinda see each digit. Another hour lost searching online for towns small enough to still have businesses only showing a seven-digit number and chasing variations of the blurry digits.
Wait, I can see the letters in the company name that look like BIG but no matches for Big Plumbing. Oh, there is a seam where the window panel is in the reflection so now look for extra letters. BING plumbing? Another hour chasing possible matches for name variations for the plumbing company. Not sure how, but I finally tumbled onto Bieg Plumbing and narrowed it to the St. Louis area.
So how hard can it be to find a BofA building in the St. Louis suburbs? Apparently too much for my tiny little brain. These damn super-sleuths are probably laughing at my amateurishness.
I blame you for the loss of my Saturday, and I still came up empty. I’m only tentatively guessing that it’s in Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis.
Nope, it’s on the Missouri side — but “Bieg Plumbing” is correct. San Mateo shows it:
Berkeley writes, “I’m glad you didn’t sic Dusty on that red van; without a plumber in the view, I’m not sure how long this would’ve taken me to solve.” Here’s a cool photo from the super-sleuth in Japan:
This picture is from the company’s Instagram and shows the founders with one of their first vans:
The CO/NJ super-sleuth has more on the van:
Really fun sleuthing this week! The red van was the key to the puzzle for me, as I suspect it was for most. This is clearly a van belonging to a plumbing company, with the name “B_g”. Unfortunately, the middle letter(s) are obscured by a window muntin. Looking like a lower case L, I tried searching BLG plumbing, along with what I thought was the phone number, 407-4564. You had obscured the area code, which would have been (too) helpful. My search did not yield anything promising, nor did the same search with 467-4564.
Realizing that I was likely getting the company name wrong, I decided to simply search “plumbing company” with the phone number. Well, apparently Google recognition is subject to the same mistakes as my eyes because the very first result was from Catholic News Archive, showing a microfiche image of classified ads from a 1988 edition of The St. Louis Review. Note that the phone number is actually 487-4564:
So, the L was actually an IE. When I googled Bieg Plumbing, St. Louis, MO, I found their webpage with a photo of a truck bearing the same logo as seen on the van.
Ok, location solved, right? Since the building in our view sports a prominent Bank of America logo, I figured all I need to do is inspect the relatively small number of BoA branches in the greater St. Louis metro area. Well, not so fast. After looking at about 20 such locations, I could not find the glass building.
Ok, the other big clue is clearly a major mall being built in the background. A quick Google search of “new malls in the St. Louis area” immediately returned the following response: “The most notable development in the St. Louis metro area is the redevelopment of the Chesterfield Mall into ‘Downtown Chesterfield,’ a mixed-use development.” I swooped into this development on Google Maps and immediately saw our building, which now features a Merrill Lynch logo in place of the Bank of America one. Dastardly trick, Chris!
Mwahahaha. The super-sleuth in Nashua writes, “Malls bring back so much ‘80s nostalgia”:
I found the window courtesy of Bieg Plumbing Co and the hollowed-out Dillards from the old mall in the background. Let’s bow our heads and pour out an Orange Julius for a real one, Chesterfield Mall (1976-2024). RIP. Forever under 50, if not Forever Young, or even Forever 21.
Eagle Rock isn’t so reverential:
You know what looks like fun? Demolishing a mall. That would be satisfying on several levels. Physically wrecking stuff is always fun, of course. Then, on a semiotic level, bulldozing a symbol of American conspicuous consumption brings a lot of pleasure. But on a real primal level, those places just felt so super weird. Where did all this stuff come from? Where does it go? Who wants it?
Malls always just made me feel gross. So I’m stoked to see them go down.
Here’s another glimpse of the Chesterfield Mall from our previous winner in Tewksbury:
As a fan of urban exploration and “dead malls,” I was super intrigued by the corpse located behind the mirror-plated building in the Google Maps view of the area:
Four anchor stores! Apparently one of the last things the mall was used for was hosting pickleball games, which is pretty amazing. As with any dead mall, some YouTuber snuck in and explored it. Here’s their tour of what’s now a pile of rubble:
Here’s more on the mall from the DC super-sleuth:
In the background of the contest photo you can see remnants of the recently demolished Chesterfield Mall, which once was the largest mall in the St. Louis metro area. In recent years, the mall gradually withered away before permanently closing in 2024 after 48 years in business:
Before its demolition, it held the dubious distinction of being the largest abandoned shopping mall in the United States — or so says the maker of this video, whose hobbies include filming himself and his friends sneaking into and exploring defunct shopping malls (starting at 25:00).
South Park had an homage to abandoned malls:
The super-sleuth in Sagaponack notes a tragedy from last week:
Welcome back, Chris, hope you had a fun Dishcation — and hopefully a little more scenic than Chesterfield, MO. But on more serious note, sending condolences to the people there who lost loved ones and homes to the tornadoes yesterday.
They touched down about 17 miles from Chesterfield. Here’s a local news report on the path of destruction that killed at least 27 people:
The “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor was near St. Louis recently when he feared a tornado was coming for him:
I drove along Route 66 through Missouri last month and encountered some heavy storms. Here was me stopping under a highway overpass waiting for the white-out rain to pass:
It was only later that I learned that it’s not a safe place to be in a tornado. Well, I was misinformed by the movies.
Next morning in St. Louis, all was beautiful again:
From a newbie in Honolulu:
Longtime reader, first-time submitter. I’ve been following the Dish since the good old blog days and have always loved this contest. I’m thrilled that, as a new Substack subscriber, I was finally able to solve one. I’m sure I’m not the only one who cracked this one, but I thoroughly enjoyed the journey. Thanks for keeping this tradition going.
You can join him by subscribing here — and be able to see the full results below, which include vibrating anal beads! How can you pass that up?
Our newcomer also sends his own view from Honolulu:
Pinch myself that I see this all day:
We are in the same valley of Barack Obama’s first address (when he was born), and I pass that house every day. The valley also contains some of the oldest, if not the oldest, archaeological evidence of human presence — dating back 1000 years, before any permanent settlement. Cool spot!
Back to the window hunt in Chesterfield, the building is revealed by this sleuth:
Well holy shit. One where I live.
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