(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:
The most iconic sandwich in this country
Seals that put their embryos in suspended animation
A bridge shaped like a rollercoaster
The “James Bond villain of architecture” who came this close to rebuilding the Twin Towers
That’s awesome, thank you! I would like the Dish subscription.
Granted! Here’s the CO/NJ super-sleuth:
I need to hurry up and file this one, as my wife and I are leaving this weekend on a big trip. I won’t say where just yet, but I hope to come back with lots of prime VFYW candidate photos for you. We are going to be a bit off the grid, so I hope I’ll have enough WiFi to submit entries the next couple contests.
To submit a photo for the contest view, please 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.
Like CO/NJ, our Burner super-sleuth is on the move:
Hello from the Delta Sky Lounge in MSP!
From the super-sleuth in Brookland:
I have to say: I can’t be the only one who tries to get as much done at work on Friday morning as possible, to clear up a bit of time in the afternoon, then keeps refreshing my personal email starting around 1pm as I wait for the week’s Dish. Often I don’t even have the patience to read Andrew’s latest — especially if it’s depressing, as it has been frequently of late — and just skip down to the next VFYW. The handful of times I’ve gotten at least the correct building within an hour is both exhilarating and then a letdown, as I’ll then have to wait another week for the next one.
Also, out of curiosity, how close do guesses have to be to get a pre-winner on the Correct Guesser list? Right window, adjacent window, right building, right city? I’ve recently been going back through my entries to compile a list of them, and for each I’m judging how close I got. I’m developing this as a self-scoring system, which I could share, but I want to make sure it’s consistent with all the VFYW conventions that have developed over the years.
For someone to get on the Correct Guesser list, they have to get the right window (but lose the tiebreaker that time). CGs then have a big edge in future tiebreakers.
On to this week’s view, here’s our super-sleuth in Austin:
This contest view brought me back. Ah, the old days of working my way along coastlines to find a specific view. This one screamed Scotland or England to me, reminding me a lot of a seaside town on the north Scottish coast called Nairn. I started there and looked at all the decent-sized cities along the UK coast: Aberdeen, St. Andrews, and so forth. After only 30 minutes, I found the specific street in the view in the seaside city of Brighton, specifically Brighton & Hove.
But that sleuth had accidentally solved for the regular VFYW in the main Dish column. He follows up:
Now I feel like the biggest idiot in the world. I just realized I solved the wrong window view:
Brighton, England, 7.04 am
I just didn’t scroll down far enough. I can’t be the first person to do that, can I?
Well, now I’m going to try to find the right location before I read your write-up.
Our super-sleuth in San Mateo reimagines the right view:
Our VFYW this week is limited by a lack of compositional focus. The photograph divides our attention between too many competing elements — the pools, the buildings, the ocean, and the sky. The horizon is awkwardly near the center, the overcast lighting flattens depth, and the cropped edges of nearby buildings are distracting interruptions. The middle portion of the frame feels congested because the buildings have similar colors, while the large foreground rooftops take up space without adding visual interest. So it’s not surprising that the image looks more like a snapshot from a balcony than a thoughtful composition.
For the Reimagined this week, the composition was strengthened by creating a clear visual hierarchy and improving the quality of light:
The scene was reframed to eliminate distracting building edges and reduce the empty sky and uninteresting foreground space. The hazy sky was replaced with golden lighting to create contrast and longer shadows, providing more depth and dimensionality. The pools were emphasized as the central focal point, while the surrounding pathways, lawns, and buildings were arranged to guide the eye toward the ocean horizon, which is emphasized.
Another sleuth guesses “Boca Raton, Florida, USA.” From our super-sleuth on Park Avenue:
A fun one. It has a sort of Jersey Shore vibe, beach front, overbuilt but not newly done or fancy like Miami. Although in case it’s not fancy Florida, I did look for a shuffle board court with all the pools that looked like they cater to that age group. No luck. In the end it was the car rental place that sealed the deal.
How the wine geek in San Francisco starts his entry:
When I first looked at this photo, I was pretty puzzled because I didn’t recognize this beach scene and I’ve been to a lot of beaches. My first guess was Lima, Peru. Not too far off for a starter — right continent!
It’s indeed in South America. Here’s the Intrepid Couch Traveler:
I am not able to provide my regular spectacular couch-side view of this week’s VFYW. Alas, Couchella and are banned from the country for some reason.
Lol. San Mateo observes, “The Hebrew on the building across the way was a very tricksy red herring this week!” The A2 Team wasn’t as deterred:
The Hebrew letters might have suggested Israel, but there is no place in Israel, on either coast, with an island in view. Not to mention the Punta Car place. So not much of a red herring.
The DC super-sleuth was thrown off at first:
This week’s contest was relatively easy, although the Hebrew words on the building in the contest photo — Bet Yaacob and Bet Meir — momentarily led me astray because my initial assumption was that I was looking at Tel Aviv. But the beach and the architectural style of some of the buildings didn’t match what I recall seeing during my visit to Tel Aviv a few years back. For that reason, I decided to focus instead on the “PUNTA CAR” sign in the contest photo, which turned out to be the key clue.
More on Punta soon. Another sleuth writes:
I let my 15-minute limit extend to about 25 this time while my husband was next to me trying to figure out which translation of War and Peace he’d be better of reading (this is a true story). I can tell you that this view is very close to Beit Yaacov synagogue, which is located in [city and country redacted].
New wrinkle for this brain: there’s a solid Jewish population there, enough to make it a vacation hotspot for the Jewish population in the surrounding countries. I never really considered South America to be a hotbed of Judaism, but there we have it.
I took two years of Biblical Hebrew when I was in seminary 20 years ago, after which I became a daily glasses wearer due to the strain of the character recognition and reading from right to left instead of left to right. And I’ll be damned if I can read a lick of it these days except “shalom”.
Another sleuth asks, “Is Dusty covering a flag?” Yup. Our super-sleuth in Sydney knows which one:
I don’t have a lot of time this weekend, so I don’t have a decent shot of the building or window, but I did get this screen grab of the giant Uruguayan flag that’s being covered up!
The “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City confirms the country:
The clues are interesting, and can be used logically. The “Punta Car” sign placed the scene in a Spanish-speaking, ocean-facing country in South America. The two-color mixture of brick-facade and white stucco buildings, and the coexistence of palms and conifer trees, pointed to Uruguay.
(Cities in southern Brazil and coastal Argentina tend to be packed more densely, and visually louder, with more trees, signs, and building colors. Meanwhile, the other major city nearby, Montevideo, lacks quite enough of those reddish brick towers, and its waterfront skyline is mostly filled, shoulder-to-shoulder, with commercial and residential blocks. In the puzzle’s view, however, the towers had a more relaxed spacing between them.)
Our super-sleuth on the UWS returns to the main clue this week:
So I see that you’re in a (somewhat) magnanimous mood this week! It’s obvious from the satellite dishes that we’re far from the equator. You kindly did not hide the Punta Car rental, which operates only in Uruguay — bingo!
Further, you used Dusty to obscure some kind of pale blue flag or banner (I still don’t know exactly what it is), but you did not obscure the sign on the Beit Yaccov Synagogue. That puts us squarely in [city redacted] — as opposed to Geneva, where there’s a synagogue of the same name.
This View is from the[building redacted]. There’s a revolving restaurant at the top, but that’s not where the window is. Nor do I think that the window is in any of the building’s residences. So maybe the art gallery / naval museum? But while I can’t find out exactly what floor those are on, I see mention that they are up with the observatory and restaurant — still too high.
Therefore, I think that your magnanimity had its limits, and that the submitter took this photo from the panoramic elevator — when it was somewhere around the 5th or 6th floor. I am willing to concede that this might be a totally bonkers idea, but at least I’m sending this guess on Saturday, not Wednesday at 10pm!
I’ve never been to Uruguay — or in South America at all — but it’s been on our list. So I eagerly away the sleuths’ many contributions.
Easier contests are nice because they draw in new sleuths. This newcomer is on to me:
Never entered this contest before, and it seems entirely too easy this week. Maybe you’re trying to lure a few of us lurkers out from behind our prior intimidation?
Chini, the legendary sleuth, circles the right spot:
Another big clue is spotted by our super-sleuth in Roberts Creek:
On the beach right behind the sign, you can see the forefinger and thumb of one of the most famous sculptures in Uruguay, La Mano:
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