VFYW: Off With His Hand!

For contest #378, we come across a comically mangled statue, a witches’ curse, an underground sex club, and much more.

(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 is kicking himself in the gut:

I need to learn to trust my instincts. My immediate reaction to last week’s contest was “Japan!” — but then I managed to convince myself it must be somewhere in Alaska. This is especially frustrating because I had just returned from Japan, where I had taken a bus from Takayama into the mountains … except I headed east to Kamikochi, instead of west to Shirakawa-go. Oh well.

Another reflection on last week’s contest, “Thatched From The Jaws Of Victory,” comes from our super-sleuth in Clinton, CT:

Purposeful or not, Contest #377 was one of the best designed in the fabled lore of VFYW history, with just enough clues to make it “getable,” but more of what’s not there, just to throw us off the precise location. I totally agree with the Ann Arbor super-sleuth that so many of us likely dismissed Shirakawa-go precisely because the thatched roofs were not visible. No matter what words I used for a standard word search, Shirakawa came up — constantly! — and every time with the thought: Nope, it’s nothing like that. Now stop!

And so, if 17 of us correctly guessed the city and the hotel, all of us — well, perhaps all of us except the sleuth who never left Colorado — must have run across Shirakawa. Hats off to the Super 17.

On to this week’s window, a stumped sleuth:

Well, it’s another super frustrating contest. But I feel like I’ve seen this. My first guess was Detroit, looking across the Detroit River at Windsor, Canada, but I couldn’t find the bridge. It feels like northern Midwest, but I couldn’t find the river/bridge/highway combination in the northern part of the US. So I’m guessing Albany, NY.

From a sleuth on the Correct Guesser list (which you get on when you guess the right window of a challenging contest but don’t win the tiebreaker yet):

At first glimpse, I sensed in the View a resemblance to Rhode Island — Providence? Newport? Middletown? Who knows?! I’ve always been a fan of cantilever bridges and thought this View was somewhere in the eastern US, so I started there. The red-brick parking building eventually became the anchor for my search, because there are in fact a fuck-load of cantilever bridges in the US!  

Chini knows:

Another sleuth guesses, “Memphis, Tennessee?” From our super-sleuth in Bethlum:

My first impression was this was Philly or Pittsburgh. Both cities have older bridges with major highways running along a river. Alas, no similar bridges turned up as I scanned both cities. But I found lots of different bridge styles. 

So, on to more discerning methods: the obvious parking deck in the view has a slightly more designed appearance than the standard brutalist concrete, so I ran a search. It turns up on the architects’ site, though the image is reversed. Turns out I had to travel downriver from Pittsburgh to get to the right location.

A sleuth in Alexandria focused mostly on rivers:

This week I thought I had a chance, in that everything looked totally Midwest. I figured it had to be one of three big rivers — Mississippi, Missouri or Ohio — and that the photo had to be taken in a decent-sized city because of the size of the building it was taken from. I thought I had it quickly, figuring the bridge in the distance was the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans, but no. So I followed the MS River north, but couldn’t find the right style of bridge. I didn’t spend much time on the MO River, since after Omaha, the cities just aren’t large enough. 

And then I moved onto the Ohio River …

That’s the right one. This next sleuth names the right city and state: