(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.)
Woo-hoo! What a thrill, thank you! I’ll most definitely I’ll take the book, so I can brag endlessly to anyone who comes near our coffee table.
What I love most about the VFYW is the odd amount of intuition that goes into it. Even though I have been lucky to have grown up in and lived all over Europe — and ultimately to Akron, OH — I have never spent any time anywhere else. Yet so many times I get to a region by just imagining myself in the location of the view, and I get a strong feeling from the sky, the vegetation and the color of the landscape. Then I move to logical deduction. But I have no idea why sometimes I know right away that we are in New Zealand, or Bali, or South America.
The contest is a Friday night/Saturday morning ritual I really enjoy.
Another exclaims:
I finally did it! I guessed the exact window last week! I have been so close, so many times. What a great feeling! Then, you see that someone found video from inside the actual room and you don’t feel so smart …
But last week’s results were fascinating, and I love the weekly history lessons!
One more brief lesson:
I was traveling last weekend and didn’t get to see or enter the Prague contest, but if you’ll forgive a postscript: the event of 1618 described by your sleuths was only one of many “Defenestrations of Prague.” Historians differ as to which are canonical, but they certainly include the 1419 defenestrations of several city officials by Hussite religious rebels, and the 1948 death of democratic Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk shortly after the communists took over, officially labeled a suicide but widely believed to have been murder.
Before we get to the official view this week, you will be happy to learn — and probably not terribly surprised — that the VFYW came through for the romantic sleuth who’s trying to find the location in Puerto Rico where he fell in love with his wife and the mother of their two boys, who are returning to the island in April. Now he knows exactly where to go to find the spot where he captured the photo of his wife that now sits on his nightstand.
Here’s a reminder of the two photos our Romeo sent as clues:
The first sleuth to send a solution was, of course, the great and powerful Chini:
The street they walked on in 2008 was Jose M. Tartak Avenue. The exact spot of the photo was:
18°26'33.28"N 66° 1'16.92"W
Sadly, the tree appears to be gone, but everything else is pretty much still there.
The next one to email was the super-sleuth in College Park:
I won’t be alone in choosing to spend my discretionary time trying to help a lover search for the canonical VFYW. The street is Calle José M. Tartak, in what Apple Maps suggests is the Isla Verde beach district of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Here’s the VFYC (view from your camera) showing the tree:
… and near the south end of Tartak, on Google Earth’s street view, I find this:
The tree supporting the pixie in a yellow sundress has, I think, been cut down — but the protrusion from the wall, the larger tree next to the retaining wall, and the various drains appear to be present and accounted for.
A few paces north, down the street toward the ocean, turn your view to the left (west) and the VFYC was:
This view of the Ocean View building, at 5575 Avenida Isla Verde, is largely blocked nowadays by the building that was under construction then, but we can get a glimpse of it if we crane our Googly necks …
The concrete-mixer VFYC is almost in line with the balconies on our side of the Ocean View — a red arrow below marks that line, and what I guess to be the line of sight in the tree VFYC is marked with a blue arrow:
That’s such an impressive entry, but technically the spot is in the city of Carolina, not the abutting city of San Juan, which is just a handful of blocks away. Here’s how another sleuth — the ski-champ one — tracked down the spot:
The Puerto Rico challenge was easier to identify than I first thought — it took me about 30 minutes to get to the exact spot in Street View — on José M. Tartak Ave, Carolina, Puerto Rico:
Facing in the opposite direction, you can glimpse the white building with the distinctive pattern of windows behind the cement truck and the then-new construction:
Unfortunately, the leaning tree has been cut down (you can see several stumps along the fence). It took me about 15 minutes of flying in Google 3D Global View along the coastal development near San Juan to find the white building, and then another 15 minutes in Street View to find the exact spot on nearby José M. Tartak Ave.
My favorite email on this mystery comes from the super-chef, who waxes poet:
So, the tree where his wife was standing is no more, but the other tree in that picture is still there, so maybe he can get a picture with his wife and the kids at that one. The tree of love will stay eternal in memory, the tree of family lives on.
Note the place where the wall juts out, which is just on the right in his photograph, directly opposite his tree. The pipe coming out of the wall is a match, as is the positioning of the stanchions in the railing. The exact location of his tree is 18.44257266339264, -66.02136517734424.
My best wishes to him and his family.
The super-champ in Berkeley gifts one of his collages:
I’m sure the usual suspects have already come through for our romantic compadre, but here’s my contribution:
Finding the spot was fun, but it was also a piece of cake. The only thing that delayed my sending this earlier was putting the collage together (I’m not as good at making them on my phone as on my laptop).
Seven sleuths in total found the spot (Eagle Rock and the Austin mixologist were the other two). The final word on this side puzzle goes to Chini:
I hope the doctors and their kids have a great time in Puerto Rico. It feels awesome for the VFYW group to use its skills for something like this, and perfectly timed a week before Valentine’s Day.
On to the main puzzle this week, here’s the beginning of the entry from Berkeley:
I wasted a little time looking at some bayous in New Orleans, because of the art nouveau ironwork in the photo and because, after three weeks of the contest being abroad, I’d gotten the idea we might be in for another stateside view. When the bayous came up empty, I recalled something Chini once said about analyzing the image for 10 to 15 minutes and adjusting its brightness and contrast before starting any serious searching (none of which had I taken the time to do).
A sleuth in Alexandria stuck with NOLA:
I’m super heckling y’all from the cheap seats way up top, with minimal research, but I’m going to throw out a guess of New Orleans Riverwalk, LA, USA, just based on the iron works in the photo. I can’t imagine how the other sleuths get the window ... too much for me :)
Another riverwalk from this sleuth:
I don’t know with this one. Vegetation and a wrought-iron canopy says southern USA to me. Then a river or canal in a denser urban area … so, how about San Antonio?
Another sleuth gets to the right continent:
Could that be Berlin on the Spree River? I am probably wrong, but it does look like the lovely beer garden my family sat at one beautiful summer day when we were visiting! The best part? We looked over the river and saw Angela Merkel herself walking around and waving to people!
Boy, this week’s challenge had me giving up before I started. I thought that I could possibly identify the scene from the white office building near the middle of the picture. It looked a little out of place. But every search for white office buildings with ridges or flutes kept bringing me to the Russian Embassy in Washington or the Egyptian Ambassador’s residence in Lisbon.
A previous winner teases the answer:
Hmm, the intricate white scalloped roof edge, the cafe chairs, the ornate scrolled ironwork on the balcony and stairs, the tranquil river. As pretty as a painting. It all has a certain ... je ne sais quoi, no?
A sleuth on Vashon Island sends “another short entry, as the week has gotten away from me” — but he names the right country:
This one really me stumped initially. At first glance, I saw the long, unmowed grass, the strings of lights that look like they might be from Costco, the buildings across the river that are devoid of any character, and an old brick building with some faux French details. This has to be America, right? Somewhere in Louisiana, maybe?
But wait, maybe that isn’t faux architecture; maybe it’s really France. And maybe these are the real lights that those Costco ones are based on. And maybe those buildings across the river do have character, now that I know they are in France. All buildings in France have character. And that unmowed grass — well, why would we French bother ourselves with such petty details as this? The long grass is better to hide the snakes.
One last thing: I was thinking about how many of your sleuths have their own “thing”: movies, drinks, the nearest Bellevue. Should I have a thing? How about the nearest island? Alas, this window is on an island, so there goes that idea.
The VFYW is always open to new things! From our super-sleuth in Toronto:
I took this shot on an airplane five days ago in anticipation of writing an entry for Prague, pointing out that I was flying in the wrong direction. However, I didn’t find the time to locate the exact window at the Mandarin Oriental. Turns out the shot seems more appropriate for this week’s contest!
Chini zooms in on the flight path:
Every so often the contest gives you a view like this one, one where you must choose a path. Path A: a ponderous slog, a morass of internet searches that could drive one to madness, boredom or both. Path B: a search of a different kind — not in the real world, but into the recesses of one’s mind palace. There, you might just find the answer to a simple, nagging question, “Where have I seen this before?” That answer, in visual form, is this week’s clue.
Giuseppe has an eagle eye:
As in contest #404, that flag looks out of context. It’s the same flag, yes: you have to squint, but you can perceive the blue, and the white is obviously there. As for the red, it’s debatable whether it’s there or not — what I see is more like a dark blob. But after a blue band and a white band, do you really need to clearly see the red band?
That landscape doesn’t look essentially French at first sight; for a few seconds, before I zoomed in on the flag, I thought it was in some southern US state or in Australia. Yet the place is as French as the baguette: the river you see in the photo is the Seine. At first I suspected we were being served a false flag for the second time in three weeks, but it costs nothing to try. I googled “France restaurant river”, and in 10 minutes I found it. The restaurant was described in a story by Guy de Maupassant, La femme de Paul (Paul’s Wife, 1881).
Now, after a French flag not in France and a French flag in France, I expect a non-French flag in France again.
The super-sleuth in San Francisco names the right island, town, and restaurant:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Weekly Dish to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
