VFYW: Funeral Potatoes & Cemetery Fudge

For contest #353, we head to a beautiful bland city in the mountains.

(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.)

A sleuth writes:

This is my first entry to this competition, so I initially though that the cartoon dog on the building was a shop logo, so I spent some time doing an image search of this screenshot:

From our super-sleuth in Kingston:

I could not recognise the logo by Dusty’s head. The street sign is too blurred. Nothing seemed to stand out until … is that a prison tower in the top-left quadrant? As Kingston is Canada’s Prison Capital, I should be able to spot a prison.

But, upon further examination, I noted that the tower in the View is rectangular and prison towers tend to be at least hexagonal with windows tilting out, providing a view to the foot of the tower. In my search, I did find an image of the Central Utah Correctional Facility, which was clearly designed by a Star Trek fan:

Another Star Trek reference to come. But first, our regular sleuth in Japan:

I have drawn a complete blank with this week’s photo. My family reckons it’s a military base in the USA somewhere, but that doesn’t narrow things down much.

I tried hard to find an image of either the white cupola or the brown building below it, but while white cupolas appear to pop up regularly on county courthouses in the USA, the style of the building only seemed to link itself to images of Windsor Castle in London. The closest I came to finding a building like Windsor but in the USA, and with a cupola, was the old State Penitentiary in Raleigh, NC:

Apparently it was constructed by the inmates themselves, with granite quarried from just outside its walls. It took more than 14 years to complete and was considered one of the state’s most gorgeous landmarks. Unfortunately it has been knocked down and replaced with something much more modern and no doubt functional but far less attractive, so there is no way it’s the building in your photograph. But thanks for the interesting hunt!

Simple guesses this week include:

• Naha, Okinawa, Japan

• Deadwood, South Dakota

• Dillon, Colorado

• Oro Valley, Arizona

• Bishop, California

• Lake Tahoe, California

Chini knows:

A previous winner in Chattanooga thinks we’re in “a state near Utah”:

Working my way north from Provo, I eventually found myself in Pocatello, Idaho and clicked on what I assumed was a misprint on Google Maps: “The Museum of Clean.” I have so many questions, so I may have to visit the museum one day. Until then, the giant mop man will haunt my dreams:

Another sleuth settles on the right state: