(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.)
Some highlights from this week’s write-up:
A look back at the first time the VFYW was in this city.
You wrote, “I believe the only other sleuth to circle the right window…”
My window guess was identical to Giuseppe’s.
Noted for the record. Another followup:
Back in March 2022, you kindly linked to my first book about antique skyscrapers, MultiStories. Imagine my surprise and delight during last week’s contest when I spotted some sleuths sharing stuff from my second book, Highrises Art Deco!
That book is a team effort: stories by me, and stunning skyscraper art by Chris Hytha. They’re not simple photos; Chris shoots a series of high-res images by drone and then stitches them together digitally. The resulting artistic composite is a cross between an architectural rendering and a yearbook photo from skyscraper high school.
In fact, here’s Chris and me in the downtown Kansas City parking lot flying the drone to create the very same Power & Light Building image your reader shared last week! I’m the old guy on the left, spotting, while Chris pilots the drone:
Since last week’s sleuth so kindly recommended our book, we’d love to offer VFYW readers a 20% discount if they want to order a copy of the book here — just use the code “FRIENDS20” at checkout. And our Highrises Collection website is a fun free browse, with 200 buildings from across the USA to sift through and read about.
Another sleuth sent the following entry last Friday, after the deadline, but since it’s related to skyscrapers …
That’s downtown Providence. You’re looking at the “Superman” building, which has been vacant for around a decade. No one wants to rent it out, and no one wants to buy it and deal with the needed renovations:
The smaller building on the left was formally known as the Biltmore Hotel, and was damaged in the hurricane of 1938:
As a followup to our Santa Monica super-sleuth’s harrowing story of losing his home in the Palisades fire, here’s a trailer for a forthcoming documentary made by Rob Montz (friend of the Dish):
If you’re in or near Santa Monica on November 23, a screening will take place at the Morgan-Wixson Theater — RSVP here.
On to this week’s view, a first-time sleuth writes:
Looks like a New England or mid-Atlantic factory town that once saw better days. The housing stock looks like it was built by a factory owner. The prominent church steeple tilts my guess towards the New England/upstate New York area. Maybe Winsted, Connecticut (birthplace of Ralph Nader)?
Getting closer is our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:
It’s an Appalachian mountain town, and crazily enough I swear I landed on Cumberland, MD, walked the streets on Google Maps, and I think this is it.
Another writes, “Best wishes from Sagaponack on the way to Lisbon”:
We’re leaving for a trip today (I’ll try to send some good potential contest pics), and I need to finish packing, so have to concede I can’t find this View. Looking forward to hearing how the super(ior)sleuths figured it out.
By the way, here’s a nice view I just captured in Sevilla:
He also provides a clever roundup of clues:
Case File No. 484: The Missing Church Spire
Filed by: Detective Sagaponack Division: Department of Unresolved Views Status: Cold Case
It started with one photo — quiet street, brick houses, one smug steeple.
Every town east of the Mississippi claimed it. None confessed.
Street View Unit: Scoured curbs, front license plates, lost the scent at the trash carts.
The view was posted on Halloween, so I wanted to investigate Sleepy Hollow, but I couldn’t find anyone to head it up.
Salem looked guilty — turned out to be a witch hunt.
Suspects: Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Asheville, Pottsville, Bethlehem, Lancaster. All had alibis.
Google Maps now thinks I’ve relocated to Pennsylvania. Let them think that.
Eleven types of trash carts identified. Zero ZIP codes solved.
The Plaque Conspiracy: Tiny house signs, unreadable and smug. Probably in on it.
Satellite Evidence: Not a single dish in sight — either a clue or a cover-up.
Architecture: Generic American Ennui, circa 1907.
Working theory: A place where humans live.
The spire is still out there — probably laughing.
Case closed. For now.
A previous winner also went with a Halloween theme:
The suburban view makes this difficult, with no specific clues outside that church steeple. Based on the overall look, I first thought this could be in the Hudson River Valley area of New York, but with more thought the same general look and housing architecture screams Pennsylvania. My guess this week was very conflicted. My head tells me that this is Bethlehem, PA, just outside the campus of Lehigh University. But my heart tells me — because the photo was posted on Halloween — that this is Sleepy Hollow, New York. That is what the correct answer should be, and so I am going with Sleepy Hollow.
Also toggling between NY and PA is our super-sleuth on Park Avenue:
I am sure there’s a clue I have missed, but at the moment I think it’s somewhere in NE PA or one of the Hudson Valley towns in NY. Maybe around Lehigh/Allentown or somewhere like Tarrytown. The church spire is elusive — at least to me. I did start looking for municipalities that issue red recycling bins, but I didn’t have enough time (or will power this week) to run them down. Very curious to see where we end up.
Chini offers an aerial and a few hints:
Man, time really flies in the twilight zone that is the view contest. When this one popped up, I thought, nah it can’t be [redacted], we were just here. Well, we were, but it was two-and-a-half years ago. And unlike our last visit, it’s almost the right time of the year to visit a town with this name …
Maybe I should have reserved it for the right time of year. On that note, here’s the super-sleuth in Tucson — aka the VFYW chef:
Just for fun, here is the map produced by Overpass of all the churches in the area:
One thing with steeples is that they tend to vary greatly, so they are easy to identify. I started looking around at different churches around Easton, but none of them seemed to match. I figure a reputable trash company would probably service a larger area than just that single town, so I went a little farther west to [city redacted]. While looking around the map for churches I found a road forking into a hill that looked very much like it could be the one from the picture and voila, the whole mystery unraveled.
The church happens to be Incarnation of our Lord parish, and we can pretty much replicate the view with Google Maps.
Our super-sleuth on the UWS can’t decide:
I just got back tonight from a week in Israel, so I had no chance to work on the View while visiting family. The best I can do is make a wild-assed guess about the state and town: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Though I’m a bit worried about the front and back license plates, so maybe Maryland? Then again, the first thing that came to my mind was West Virginia. In other words: I’ve got nothing.
A previous winner settles on the right state:
I ought to be helping my Judge of Elections wife prepare for Tuesday, but this week’s view looked so much like Pennsylvania that I had to go on a search. Thank goodness for the extra hour this weekend from Daylight Savings!
Another goes with simply “Jim Thorpe, PA, USA.” Another: “Bedford, Pennsylvania.” Another PA town:
This looks like so many towns in hilly western PA where I live, so I’ll pick the one named after an influential Native American woman with the wonderful name of “Queen Aliquippa.” She parlayed with the young George Washington long ago when he was scouting around what would one day become Pittsburgh.
Young Major Washington visits Queen Aliquippa in 1753
Another town is guessed by the married team in Falcon Heights: “It looks like Reading, PA, but we’re not having luck finding it.” From a previous winner:
Good afternoon from Toronto — having arrived late night yesterday, eating a burger in the hotel bar surrounded by hundreds of raucous Blue Jay supporters. Good fun, although I know little about baseball.
I think the picture is of North 11th Street near Spring Street in Reading, Pennsylvania. The building and window is marked with an X:
The Reading Public Museum exhibits an Egyptian mummy and works by Degas, and includes a planetarium and arboretum — and that’s about all I know about Reading (including the fact that my friend from Maryland has not played golf there), save that Reading is also known the Pretzel City, due to its many bakeries.
But for your information, there is also an English town in Berkshire called Reading. It’s known for hosting the Reading Music Festival — and has a truly awful soccer team, languishing in the depths of the lower leagues. It’s also one of the largest urban areas in the UK without having a “city” status. Irrelevant to your competition, but ...
No fun facts are irrelevant! Also picking Reading is our Intrepid Couch Traveler:
I really wanted to just guess Pennsylvania, but rules are rules. Reading has row houses. The VFYW has row houses. My limited time ran out. So Reading it is.
Far more important is this week’s couch — from Pennsylvania mining country:
The curse of the Stone Couch today runs something like this: sit on it the first time, and you will have bad luck. The second time you lie on the couch, someone in your family will die. The third time, death comes for you.
Comfy.
Turning to trash, here’s the super-sleuth trio in Vancouver, WA:
I predict the tagline for this week’s search is “dumpster diving,” or something similar. The largest clue was the trash bins featuring a large logo likely ending in “ZZ”.
Next up, “the a-maize-ing sleuth in Ann Arbor”:
This view was harder than usual, because most of the features led me down a wrong path. The turning point came when I found the red garbage bin:
The company “J. P. Mascaro & Sons” allowed me to concentrate on eastern Pennsylvania. (The blue and green bins in front of other houses didn’t help.)
From our Burner super-sleuth:
EXCELLENT window. I thought this was going to be an easy one given the huge clue, the red bins (who uses red bins?!). But I was wrong. While it was easy to find municipalities that use red bins, it was impossible to use any of the other visual clues to pinpoint the location. Great choice of window. I happily cede defeat.
So does the VFYW chef:
Sometimes it’s the journey, not the destination. This week’s sleuthing has been fun and full of new knowledge — some useless and some interesting. Useless knowledge: all the trash pickup companies in Pennsylvania, including JP Mascaro & Sons of the red carts. Probably the red herrings.
Interesting: the terminology for spires. Broach spires transition from a square base to an octagonal spire, and those windows in the spire are lucarnes. Also: exploring the mystery of the green plaques on the houses. Are they E911 signs? I don’t think so; nobody uses those even in counties and municipalities that have ordinances requiring them. Are they signs of membership in a community established by aliens? More likely.
The best thing I learned about this week is Overpass, a tool that accesses the OpenStreetMap database and, for example, lists all the churches with spires in a defined area. This was also the worst thing I learned about, from the perspective of productivity in my day job.
But never mind, this was fun, as always! My wife and I had a great time last week visiting old haunts in Boston, including Faneuil Hall:
Here’s some food porn from Quincy Market:
And from our meal at O Ya, at which I achieved success in not losing the entire meal afterward using the cunning strategy of not eating any caviar:
Back to trash, a recent winner zeroes in:
Hey there! We’ve had quite a long streak of US-based views which is helping me out greatly so the submission streak continues. This one ended up being easier than it looked at first, thanks to a number of clues throughout the image. From general architecture, landscape, and of course the flags, we can tell this is in the US, probably on or near the East Coast. Those types of homes and also the trees remind me very strongly of the Northeast, so that’s the first general clue.
After that, it seemed like there weren’t a lot of clues, but then I noticed the trash cans. You can faintly make out the presence of two Zs, so maybe Rizz or Fizz?
A quick Google search found a Rizz Trash Service based in Easton, PA which would fit with my initial observation.
Here’s Yakima again:
Rizz’s website says it serves Northampton, Lehigh, and Monroe counties in PA and Warren and Hunterdon counties in NJ. Should be easy from there, right? Here’s how my fiendishly clever chain of reasoning led me astray:
Three cars in the view have front license plates. New Jersey requires them, Pennsylvania does not. Thus we’re in New Jersey. (Wrong!)
A Google search for “Rizz containers” now autocompletes “Rizz containers and front license plates,” so at least one other sleuth is already on the same scent.
Sharp low-angle light on the background trees and horizontal shadow borders on dormers suggests it’s an early morning view with light from the east, so we’re looking north. (Wrong!)
Shouldn’t be too hard to do a search for the steeple in Warren and Hunterdon counties. Came up empty!
Probably from a hotel, so look at all of those in Warren and Hunterdon counties. None have an adjacent matching corner.
Sidewalks, parking signs, and lack of front yards say we’re urbanish. We’re looking at a row of colonial-style houses on the interior of a sharp, obtuse-angled street corner, with a distinctive wedge-shaped corner yard. The western NJ road system, while oriented parallel to Appalachian ridges instead of north-south, is 99% rectilinear. The obtuse corner I want should be easily recognizable on satellite view. Warren and Hunterdon counties aren’t that big. Can’t be too hard to do a brute force search in satellite view. Nada!
Maybe Rizz’s website is out of date? I phoned them to see if they’ve expanded their NJ service area, and they said they don’t even do residential pickup in NJ, except for a few HOAs and property management groups. So... maybe it could be in PA after all?
Repeat hotel search for Northampton, Lehigh, and Monroe counties in PA. No go.
I tried a semi-random brute search of Northampton, Lehigh, and Monroe counties — but the area is much bigger and more densely populated than adjacent NJ. Gave up in discouragement.
Finally, I repeated the steeple search.
That got him there. Our super-sleuth in San Mateo confirms the Rizz:
According to the RIZZ website, “Rizz Containers has also expanded into different aspects of the garbage industry. Today, they serve both commercial and residential customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.” To “narrow” down the possible cities, I put together a list of cities served by Rizz Containers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a short list.
By the way, “rizz” is modern slang that means charisma.
Architecturally, the rows of brick duplex (“twin”) houses with dormers and front porches suggest Pennsylvania, Delaware, Camden and Trenton NJ, and Baltimore. Of the cities served by RIZZ, that suggested that I should look at the PA towns of Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton.
He picked the right city. The Brookline super-sleuth names it:
For this week’s contest, I came dangerously close to grappling with my VFYW nemesis — the rabbit hole of endless church spires — but I realized just in time that there was another path forward through the colorful world of waste management. The trash bins in the view seemed pretty distinctive, especially the red one:
It did not take long to identify them as belonging to Rizz Containers (green) and J.P. Mascaro & Sons (red) — two waste disposal and recycling services based in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Both company websites very helpfully listed their respective service areas, and so comparing the listings pointed to overlapping areas in Lehigh, Northampton, and Monroe Counties.
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