(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
A window-less school that looks like a prison
Steam pipes substituting for hot springs this week
A sleuth who just lost his dog, and another who just adopted one
Multiple sleuths heading down to see the window IRL
Wow, that’s awesome and very unexpected. Eleven entries going back to 2012 is hardly an auspicious record, but I’m psyched to have won. I would like the VFYW book as my prize/trophy. Thanks so much, and hopefully it won’t be long before I have another correct guess.
Here’s a followup from “the a-maize-ing sleuth” in OKC:
Last week’s entry about “fish farts” reminded me of the fish bladder as the evolutionary origin of our lungs and larynx. The topic was covered by John Colapinto’s book This Is the Voice. As explained in the NYT book review:
Colapinto makes the case that our larynx — the human voice box — may well be the most important boost evolution bestowed. At its most basic, vocalization requires two pieces of equipment: lungs and vocal cords. For both these items, we have the lungfish to thank. Their lungs evolved from their swim bladder — the internal pool float that helps them hold to a certain depth. The walls of lungfish bladders in particular are so thin that oxygen can pass through them into the blood. Vocal cords evolved as a valve to keep water out of these proto-lungs. Lungfish vocalizations are on a par with the sounds of air escaping the mouth of a balloon.
“I am trying to avoid the word ‘farts,’” Colapinto says nobly, “but I’m afraid those were the first vocal sounds heard on earth.”
Now there’s a Dish money quote if I ever saw one. A visual followup on last week’s gas-station theme comes from a sleuth in Vancouver:
Here’s a Montreal gas station designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1967, now repurposed as a community centre on Nuns Island:
The A2 Team nerds out:
I was intrigued by the comment from last week about the etymology of Alburquerque and Albuquerque, especially since — embarrassingly for a philologist — I had just overlooked the additional r in the name of the Spanish town. The derivation from Latin albus quercus still sounds most plausible to me, much more so than an Arabic Abū al-Qurq — especially since I have not been able to find an Arabic word qurq or some such for cork (cork in Arabic is fallīn, also not an original Arabic word). If qurq exists at all, it would most likely be a local derivation, again from the Latin quercus. However, albus quercus does not account for the first r in Alburquerque, but could easily lead to Albuquerque. I found Alberquerq[ue] on a 16th-century map, but I’d be curious to find whether an “original” form of the name can be determined, with or without the r.
The VFYW draws in experts of every kind. Here’s our chef answering my recent call for view submissions:
This is probably not useful, but just in case, I’m sending it along:
It’s a view from room 604 in The Hoxton Hotel in Chicago, 200 N Green St, Chicago, IL. It doesn’t have any obvious (to me) landmarks. I didn’t get a shot from outside.
Yeah, an outside shot with the window circled is ideal, but that’s still a solid submission — thanks! Another sleuth writes:
This might be a decent photo for the contest:
If you zoom in on the right, you will see two ridges that are part of Haleakalā in Maui. It was taken from a private home, but I don’t know if that matters to you.
As long as the owner doesn’t mind. If you’d like to submit your own photo for the VFYW, use contest@andrewsullivan.com. Horizontal photos are preferred, and make sure part of the window frame is showing. Please also send a photo of the building with the window circled, which makes the contest go much smoother. If we select your view, you’ll get six free months added to your Dish subscription.
On to this week’s view, the Burner super-sleuth exclaims, “Finally, an easy window!” The CO/NJ super-sleuth agrees:
This was recognition on first sight. Well, at least I knew the city at first glance. It took a few minutes of roaming to find the actual window, but not much more than that.
I would have sent my entry right in, but I thought I had already completed the sleuth quadfecta (getting a window, getting the win, featuring a window and, now, getting the window first), since you emailed me to tell me that I was first for the Bridgeport contest. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the Reno sleuth had apparently taken the gold. Oh well, I will have to try again next week.
That was my bad, apologies. Next up is Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:
After four-and-a-half years, the VFYW is back in Chini City — also known as the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps, Gotham, or New York City. For contest #296, we were in SoHo. This time, we are in [neighborhood redacted].
From the Intrepid Couch Traveler:
Since this was clearly an easy-week contest, I wanted to make sure you have a VFYW candidate for the next hard-week contest that returns to Gotham — a true test for any sleuth:
Heh. Specifying the borough is our super-sleuth team in Vancouver, WA:
We completely struck out this week. Our best guess is: Manhattan (New York City), NY.
Our super-sleuth in Brookline has some sad news:
Sorry to report that we said goodbye to our dog this afternoon. It sucks, but at least we were able to spend a lot of time with her. And we had a really good walk this morning, which felt like old times … maybe it was her parting gift.
I didn’t have much time for the contest this week, but thankfully I needed only two seconds to recognize this scene as Midtown Manhattan.
Here’s an aerial view from the a-maize-ing sleuth:
A photo I took when leaving NYC contains the hotel of our puzzle this week:
(If I say the date was 5/11/2025, can some sleuth guess the time of day and the flight I was on?)
For last week’s view, I don’t have an aerial shot of the Sawtooth Range. I was on the wrong side of the plane when flying over the area in July 2025 and only got a picture of Crowley Lake and Mammoth Mountain, much to the south of Bridgeport:
Back in the Daily Dish days, we had a periodic feature called “The View From Your Airplane Window,” which you can browse here.
Chini zooms in closer to this week’s window:
Our super-sleuth in San Mateo points to a clue in view:
First, we note that there’s a Mitsubishi Electric “SMART MULTI” logo on one of the HVAC appliances visible on the roof:
Unfortunately, this clue isn’t very useful because Mitsubishi Electric operates local sales, service, and distribution subsidiaries in dozens of countries worldwide, including the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. As a result, SMART MULTI systems are available in many of those regions through local HVAC distributors and installers. So we’ll have to use other clues to identify the city.
Another clue is spotted by our super-sleuth in Roberts Creek:
I first thought the street sign with a star was a bus stop, and I thought maybe Texas because of the star. But that was so off the mark!
Notes our super-sleuth in Yakima:
This city utilizes white signs with the red, corner-star symbol to mark parking restricted to authorized vehicles:
Of the states with yellow license plates, this does not look like Alaska or New Mexico, and I think I see a hint of the upper black band that marks New York’s plates:
Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods writes, “The exterior fire escapes were another giveaway.” A far more consequential clue is highlighted by the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
Last week the Ruby Inn had the street address 333 Main St., and the 333 is the key to this week’s contest as well, visible here:
From the super-sleuth in Tewksbury:
A familiarity with how NYC streets and addresses were laid out dramatically narrowed down my search:
Odd-numbered buildings are on the north side of the street.
Cars moving left to right means they’re moving east.
Even-numbered streets (generally) have traffic going east.
Buildings numbered 333 (like the tall one in the distance) are going to be pretty close to the rivers.
So, I’m looking for even-numbered streets on the far west and east sides of the city, with a school on the north side of the block, towards its eastern end.
Didn’t take long after that to find the building.
Back to San Mateo, who identifies the right 333 building:
When we query this NYC database to create a list of buildings at 333 addresses in Manhattan, it turns out that there are 124 such buildings (though one physical building can sometimes have multiple address points). Let’s use that NYC building database to map such buildings:
This scatter plot of latitude versus longitude for “333” buildings in Manhattan reveals several spatial patterns. The points form a long diagonal band running from southwest to northeast, and this reflects the orientation of Manhattan’s street grid, which is rotated about 29 degrees from true north. Because Manhattan’s numbered streets generally run east–west across the island, buildings sharing the same street number, such as 333, align along those cross streets. When plotted in geographic coordinates, this produces the diagonal pattern visible in the chart.
The data points span a range of latitudes, corresponding to most of Manhattan’s north–south extent. This suggests that there are buildings numbered 333 on many different streets from Lower Manhattan up through Midtown and into Upper Manhattan or Harlem, i.e. 333 is not concentrated in a single neighborhood.
However, 124 is too many addresses to scan manually, so let’s look up the buildings in the NYC MapPLUTO database for those 124 buildings and filter the results to show only buildings with ≥8 stories. The answer is a tractable number, and looking at each of them gets us quickly to the right “333” building.
Here’s the result, with our building in bold:
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