(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.)
Wow! My partner and I are thrilled at the victory in Guatemala City! We recently moved in together (things are going great btw) and I got her all caught up in the VFYW hustle. It’s a source of quality time.
Winning has me looking back on the contest and my entries. I first entered 11 years ago (!!!), shortly after I began reading Andrew in college. I offered a second entry a year later. Then came a seven-year hiatus, which I attribute to the beginnings of my professional life — the stresses that come along with it, and moving all over the country several times (which helps with the contest, by the way). I was jolted back into competition by the Lone Pine view of contest #277, in which I reflected a bit on backpacking alone.
We are continually impressed by the curation you do, Chris, and of the weekly entries. We suspect we are not the only ones who have, for example, a spreadsheet of our favorite cocktails, or movies to see, or places to go, thanks to our fellow Dishheads. A big thanks to everybody.
It brings me such joy that spreadsheets are being made for the contest, truly.
Next up, a recent winner in Christchurch who just got her prize in the mail — and she offers this flashback to the Dish blog:
Thanks very much for the View book — I love it! It’s definitely taking pride of place on the coffee table.
By the way, I have an update on a long-ago VFYW featured on the Dish Daily, in July 2010. Here’s the image again:
As you covered on the blog, Christchurch suffered from a catastrophic series of earthquakes commencing on 4 September 2010, with the most damaging event occurring on 22 February 2011 (less than a year after the View photo was taken). The featured View was taken from an Art Deco-style apartment building known as the Victoria Mansions — a listed historic building located at the intersection of Victoria, Montreal and Salisbury Streets. The building survived the earthquakes with some damage, but it’s sat empty since and is currently derelict. Although various ideas have been floated to reinstate the building, none seem to have gotten off the ground.
While I was searching for this VFYW on the old blog, I came across a post titled “Kiwi Exceptionalism” (followup here), regarding the post-Christchurch earthquake climate. New Zealand now has a population of 5,265,549, despite having a problem with brain drain due to the youth departing for Australia, the UK, and the US. The population has been significantly bolstered by immigrants (of which I am one), and the government opens and shuts the gates of immigration as required to buoy economic indicators.
New Zealand is otherworldly in its beauty, of course, but it also has hilarious and quirky cultural things (see the Dildogate protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and Laser Kiwi).
Christchurch pulled together after the earthquakes, and mostly again after the mosque shooting (that’s a whole other subject). The city is now 12 years from the worst earthquakes, which has meant a very mixed bag of earthquake recovery. Hooray for safer buildings; boo for astronomical commercial rents rendering a night out financially ruinous. The housing stock has been vastly improved by the destruction of shitty, uninsulated and leaky homes, and an influx of new builds due to insurance money.
However, being a low-wage and low-innovation/productivity nation, New Zealand’s economic wellbeing is highly reliant on property prices. Twelve-plus years of selling each other property at ever-accelerating prices without a rising tide lifting all wages has meant that owning a home is becoming unsustainable, if you can attain it at all. Even if one manages to grasp the lower rungs of the property ladder, all but those at the top are getting fucking crushed.
No shade, but I don’t really believe there is a “Kiwi exceptionalism,” and I worry about the country’s long-term prospects. We’re a lonely island nation at the bottom of the world, dependent on our allies for security and military. Our economy is subject to many of the same headwinds as our allies, but without the scale or flexibility to surf the waves. We’re rapidly converting arable land into apartment blocks and subdivisions (which doesn’t seem to be lowering property prices), and export much of what we produce. Our medical system is imploding, much like the British NHS … but without the money and cosmopolitan appeal of London, etc. to draw qualified people to our shores.
Someone smarter than me would probably take my viewpoint to pieces, and I welcome that. I’ve gone a bit Eeyore on New Zealand’s prospects.
Anyhoo, happy Monday! And thanks again for the View book.
Here’s one thing I love about the contest: even it — not just the main Dish — has strong dissents. The latest example comes from a persistent sleuth near San Francisco:
With all due respect, I think you got it wrong last week. Attached is my argument and evidence:
Your winner last week picked the 10th floor. But your Berkeley champ has the 7th floor, as I did, and it may be closer to the correct window.
As for tiebreakers, I don’t know exactly what a “correct guess” is, but if it means the right address, I think I must have at least 14 of them. My first was in May of 2011. Sadly, I only send a guess if I am pretty sure I find the building. I don’t have a lot of total entries.
What does it all matter? I don’t think it will surprise you that some of your players are a bit obsessive and highly competitive. Count me as one of those. It bugged me all weekend. Now I can let it go.
But being frustrated by once again losing a tiebreaker did push me to walk down memory lane, trying to remember if I in fact did have 14+ entries. I found your contest archive and loved it.
I love the obsessive entries, and I’m very willing to admit I got the close call wrong last week. The super-sleuth in Seville goes big picture:
Three in a row, baby! After figuring this one out, I went to take a shower and began reflecting upon the VFYW contest overall. In my, well, view, to succeed in the contest requires some combination of the following:
Basic Intuition: The sleuth must begin the contest with a general gut sense of where in the world the view is. Does it look Mediterranean? Does it feel Latin American? Does it have an Asian ethos? And so on.
General Observation: After establishing this general gut sense, the sleuth must then look out for the clues — sometimes obvious, sometimes unremarkable — that can narrow the search further. Is the environment urban, rural, coastal, etc.? What kind of license plates are there? What side of the road are cars driving on? Are there any landmarks or buildings with unique characteristics? Are there any signs with a specific language? The list goes on.
Intelligent Investigation: Here is where the contest truly takes off. The sleuth needs to be discriminating in knowing what to search and which tools to use: e.g., “university campus orange building” on Google, French bay on Google Earth, etc.
Dogged Persistence: Much of the investigation will prove fruitless if the sleuth does not employ some amount of determination — whether that means, for example, scanning every lake near the Alps until finding the right geographic landmark, or looking up all the gas stations in the American Southwest until the right one pops up.
Good Fortune: Even so, sometimes the yielded results prove too great for any reasonable sleuth with familial and professional obligations to go through. So some luck in the search will often come in handy.
Specific Knowledge: The sleuth who possesses specific knowledge of power plants or trees or satellite dishes or what-have-you will always have a leg up on any given week. This criterion includes the random sleuth who visited that random location 12 years ago on a random trip.
None of the above is particularly insightful, and I’m sure I’m missing a criterion or two. But it’s what I was thinking about in the shower, so I thought I’d share.
On to this week’s view, a previous winner writes:
This is definitely the US — but where? I immediately thought Florida, and when searching for yellow hydrants, The Villages northwest of Orlando popped up. It has a tropical feel like the photo. There is even a JT Contracting in the town, but I couldn’t connect it, nor could I connect a “Certified Auto Repair” shop. So when it’s all said and done, I’m guessing that this is a WAG.
Giuseppe observes, “First ‘CGI,’ then ‘BAC,’ now ‘Certified Auto Repair’. That’s definitely a trend!” Another bid for Florida:
I’m guessing that this week’s window is located somewhere on Whitehead Street in Key West. Palm tree, white fence, louvered windows and a low-slung Key West-looking street scene … without being too obvious with cute colored houses.
Thanks for letting me take a random shot!
Another shot for the Keys:
I didn’t have much time to look, but it just reminds me of Key West. Looks Southern and bougie, so maybe Savannah or Charleston, but I’ll stay with Key West.
I almost forgot to enter because I’m traveling! I have three good locations to create window picks for you, so I’ll put something together when I return.
Yes please — and if you can, please take a photo of the building with the window circled. That will prevent the kind of tough calls we saw last week.
The super-sleuth in Eagle Rock teases the right coast:
This view just shrieks, bellows, SCREAMS Miami Beach. From the palm trees to the faux-Spanish architecture, to the beachy coral and yellow buildings, to the nice flat terrain for a green bike lane.
It is not Miami Beach. It’s about 2,926 miles from there.
But when I thought it was Miami, I happened to virtually cruise by a view I recognized: the apartment where Al Pacino shot the chainsaw massacre in Scarface. It’s now a CVS, which just goes to show that nothing is profane anymore:
Another sleuth names the right state:
California plates, southern California flora, mid-century modernish NAPA auto parts design. Doesn’t look like any of the NAPA locations in my hometown of San Diego, so I’ll go with Los Angeles.
So does the super-sleuth in Chattanooga:
I have learned more than I care about the series-24, wet-barrel fire hydrants, which need to be where it won’t freeze and are generally found in California and Florida, so I left the too far north Jacksonville. But there are too many municipalities still remaining between just those two states for me to find the very unusual bike-path intersection markings that hold the solid lime green but emit white hashmarks.
Many cars don’t have a front license plate, which suggests Florida, but the buildings seem more California. Beverly Hills has palm-and-ficus lined streets, but not yellow hydrants. Some parking meters in LA look similar enough, but I’m not finding that matching red tag. Both the grass and picket fence feel more Florida, but the window itself feels more of a California craftsman style. The maybe former NAPA Service Station isn’t clarifying anything.
I learned a bit about all the different types of palms as well, but not enough to solve anything. Young sable palms have “boots” that make a rough bark, but smoother trunks when fully grown out.
Enough about what I couldn’t figure out. Los Angeles covers enough area to cover a stabbing guess, despite such a narrow street, so I’ll go with that city.
Team Bellevue notes:
The NAPA sign seems like the best clue, so we recurse there and fairly quickly are 100% convinced it’s for real a NAPA Auto Care location. The problem is, according to its website, “NAPA quality goes a long way. In fact, NAPA AutoCare is the largest network of independent mechanics in North America. We have over 14,000 locations.”
14,000.
The Bellevue crew eventually got to the right NAPA. As did this previous winner:
This week, a long-shot worked. After a fruitless search for the “JT” logo on the truck, the sign behind it looked to be “Certified Auto Repair” — and to my great surprise, googling got me to the very sign, and this cheerful-looking lineup:
From our Russian-American super-sleuth:
I can’t believe this, but I got it! I was ready to explore all 14,000 NAPA locations in the US, but then I decided to concentrate on contractors in the palm-tree growing states. (I also learned every possible way of spelling and styling letters “JT” — a very useful skill, I am sure.) Somehow I got to Carroll Construction, which built the white condo building visible in our view.
The super-sleuth in Chicagoland shares a more profound view than the one featured this week:
Alas, I am on vacation, with little time or bandwidth to find that NAPA shop. Instead, I’ll share a View From A Bunker overlooking the Easy Red segment of Omaha Beach taken a few minutes ago:
Back to our NAPA view:
It looks like southern California. My guess is Santa Barbara.
A sleuth in LA thinks we’re in northern California:
The moment I saw that gas station in the background, I was reminded of a gas station down near San Francisco’s Embarcadero, whose cost per gallon was so shocking even to my wife and me — gasoline price-hardened Angelenos — that I had to take a picture of it. (I want to share it, but it’s on my old dead phone!)
I looked up various gas stations in the area, but not luck. I could still be searching using Google Earth, but I’ve got a life to live. The tiled roof on the modern building across the street, the Mexican fan palm in the foreground, the one-way street, and the overcast all scream San Francisco. So that’s what I’m going with.
From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
After last week’s impressionistic watercolor “VFYW Reimagined,” I thought this week I’d return to a more realistic style. I wanted to emphasize the red-tile roof of that building across the street, palm trees, the nearby gas station, and the white SUV:
He follows up:
You’ve been featuring my VFYW Reimagineds for a while, so I thought you might also appreciate a different kind of reimagination. For the past 40 years, the de Young Museum in San Francisco has been presenting an annual “Bouquets to Art” exhibit, where local floral designers create arrangements inspired by one of the artworks in the museum. We visited the exhibit on Tuesday, and here’s one I particularly liked:
He also scrutinizes a license plate from last week:
The “ski-nerd champ” who provided the plate shown in your report for contest #421 didn’t mention that the Alice’s Restaurant on his license plate holder is a well-known restaurant in Woodside, CA — on state highway CA-35 Skyline Blvd. (and incidentally, quite near your San Mateo super-sleuth!):
Here’s what Alice’s Restaurant says about Alice’s Restaurant:
Alice’s is a little slice of bliss among the redwoods. It’s a place where families, motorcyclists, hikers, equestrians, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, locals, and visitors can all come together to enjoy a great meal. Whether you want gourmet burgers and sweet potato fries, one of our scrumptious scrambles, or homemade pie, you can find it here. We use the finest locally-sourced ingredients, serving up mouthwatering food in a casual atmosphere. We’ve got several local microbrews on tap, as well as local wines.
The building was originally constructed in the early 1900s as a general store to support the logging industry. A hub of local history, it served the area (then called “Four Corners”) until the 1950s when it was turned into a restaurant. In the 1960s, Alice Taylor bought the restaurant and renamed the restaurant after herself. Alice’s Restaurant (and the adjacent buildings) is family owned & operated, dog friendly, and a world-famous stop for motorcyclists, hikers, and tourists!
This is not the Alice’s Restaurant memorialized by Arlo Guthrie in his eponymous 1967 song. Arlo’s Alice’s Restaurant is in Stockbridge, MA and was named after Alice Brock, and Alice’s Restaurant in Woodside was named after Alice Taylor.
Back to this week’s window, it’s circled here by Chini:
The grand champion adds, “This week’s crossword clue: a joint owned by a bunch of pollsters with way too much in common.”
Our Burner sleuth in Seattle names the city we’re looking at:
It helps that I lived in California for over 20 years, as I recognize the gas station.
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