(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 short bridge that gives haircuts to tall trucks.
Awesome. You ALSO have a great weekend, Chris. If the Airstream ever makes its way to Greenville, SC, I’ll buy you a libation of your choice.
The Airstream very much needs a tuneup. Here’s a followup from our super-sleuth in Tucson:
I felt bad about missing last week’s window until I remembered that I also missed the last time we were in Bethlehem — in 2023. So clearly it isn’t me, but rather an interdiction handed down from on high against my success with regard to any place named Bethlehem. Which totally makes sense given my religious views. Phew, that makes me feel better.
Another followup comes from a sleuth on the Correct Guesser list:
When I saw the picture from last week, my first thought was that it looks a lot like Bethlehem, PA, where I studied undergraduate. I looked for a few minutes but I had a busy week and never got back to it. Not only was the picture taken from Lehigh University, it was down the street from my freshman dorm:
I have driven and walked past those houses so many times, which explains why they looked so familiar. I have guessed three buildings correctly in recent contests, and I can’t believe I missed this one.
I could have added a little history to your write-up. The garage that the gentleman took the picture from was the site of the original football stadium at Lehigh. I included a picture from Google Maps that shows some of the remnants of the old stadium:
No one mentioned anything about the Lehigh-Lafayette football rivalry, which is the “Most Played” rivalry in the US and started in 1884. (Harvard-Yale is the oldest rivalry.) They are set to meet again in two weeks.
The tradition from the Lehigh-Lafayette game was to tear down the wooden goal posts after the game, and fraternities would display the pieces of wood over their bar with the scores of the game painted on the remnants of the posts. After some violent incidents, in 1991 they decided to replace the wooden goal posts with steel posts. That was my first Lehigh-Lafayette game, and afterwards a melee broke out on the field with people climbing the posts and the cops spraying tear gas.
The architectural super-sleuth in NYC writes, “Please let Mark Houser know I’ve purchased his skyscraper books and look forward to reading them.” The VFYW biologist also appreciates Houser’s work:
What a useful report last week! I’ve added Overpass (the tool accessing the OpenStreetMap database) recommended by the chef, as well as Housers’s Highrises site to my VFYW folder. It’s amazing how many times I’ve found myself trying to identify one!
On to this week’s view, here’s our super-sleuth on the UWS:
Thanks for your restrained use of Dusty this week, thus allowing us to see a gigantic clue. I’m predicting that you’ll get a lot of right answers on this one — of the building, if not the window.
Chini circles the window:
Here’s another VFYW stalwart — our super-sleuth in San Mateo:
This week the Reimagined process goes quantitative!
A numerical analysis of the VFYW photo shows a clear geometric structure that fits what you’d expect from an urban scene. Around 16% of the edges run horizontally and 15% vertically, giving a combined blockiness index of 0.31. In other words, about a third of the edges line up neatly with a grid, which makes sense given the straight lines of the brick buildings and windows. The edge orientation entropy is 5.04 bits, which points to a moderate amount of variety in direction: the photo is organized, but not overly rigid. The brick buildings give it that blocky backbone, while the trees, cars, and open sky soften things just enough to keep it from feeling too mechanical. It ends up striking a nice balance between built order and natural looseness.
So, let’s increase the blockiness index by Reimagining the VFYW with a LEGO theme:
With this LEGO-inspired Reimagined, the blockiness index jumps to 0.39, with about 11% of edges running horizontal and 28% vertical. The pixelated, brick-like texture significantly enhances the straight edges and flattens out the rest. The orientation entropy drops to 4.68 bits, meaning that there is less directional variety — the image becomes more dominated by grid-aligned lines.
Basically, the LEGO-inspired Reimagining exaggerates everything that was already there: flat planes, sharp angles, and simplified forms. It wipes out most of the fine detail and organic texture, leaving us with a stylized, cartoon version of the skyline. Numerically and visually, it’s about 25% more “blocky” than the original, just what I’d hoped to achieve.
Here’s the beginning of the entry from the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
The front license plates in last week’s view were a fiendish trick to divert us from the correct state. Yes, we did search for church spires in Pennsylvania, but if it hadn’t been for those license plates, maybe we’d stuck around the state a bit longer?
In this new contest, we were mislead again, initially, by a satellite dish that seemed to point away from us. And together with lush green and blooming trees, it seemed to suggest the Southern Hemisphere. However, there is no Anglophone country in that hemisphere that drives on the right. So, back to the US.
The US it is. From our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:
Tough week for me. Denver is the only place I matched up with Clueless and Kimberly Akimbo in the same city. But it sure doesn’t seem like Denver to me — more like a city in the South minus palm trees. Oh well, better luck next week.
It’s indeed a city in the South. But what’s “Kimberly Akimbo”? A sleuth in Geneva explains:
This one turned out to be relatively easy for me. Despite Dusty’s best effort, the “Downtown Find Your ____” quickly gets us to [city redacted]. Then I had some luck: my wife purchased the same Kimberly Akimbo Broadway poster that is visible in the lower-right corner, so that jumped out at me and the venue was easy to find.
Our super-sleuth in Yakima reveals the other musical clue:
This week’s view had an abundance of easy-to-find logos. The inside-out rainbow of the Broadway musical Kimberly Akimbo, now on national tour. (The primary arc of real rainbows has the red on the outer convex circumference.)
Then there’s the typography for the touring production of Clue: The Musical. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the letter after the C was an upper-case “I” or a lower-case “L”, but the following lower-case partial letter has to be a “U” — so L it is:
Another sleuth gets nostalgic:
Like many Gen Xers, Clue was one of my favorite board games. I have many found memories playing it in the basement of my grandparents’ basement in Eastham, MA — not too far from Andrew’s summer home in Provincetown — where we spent every summer in the ‘80s. I can still smell the mothballs in my grandmother’s square-dancing dresses she stored “down cella” (they dropped their “Rs” like all good New Englanders) as we determined it was Mr. Mustard with the rope in the study.
Later, the wonderful film adaptation was my first education on McCarthy-era Red Scare politics. Clue the Movie was the Barbie of its time — a shameless IP money grab recontextualized into pretty insightful social satire:
Initially I thought the photo was taken somewhere in the Midwest — maybe Madison, WI or Rochester, NY — since they’ve had recent performances of the play. It’s crazy how these 3rd tier American cities all look alike: old brick buildings, maybe some new glass-encased, ten-story, mixed-use office buildings signaling urban renewal in a downtown bisected by train tracks.
However, I couldn’t find the building with the “Find Your…” sign.
Berkeley did:
My initial idea was to try to identify a regional live theater venue that had recently staged productions of Clue and whatever five-Tony-winning musical was represented in the other partial poster. When that search didn’t result in anything right away, I cut it short and simply searched for the phrase “downtown find your….” Because the three-word string was distinctive enough that the slogan’s final word wasn’t needed. I was cool with wherever Dusty chose to snooze.
Connecting those clues is our super-sleuth in Chattanooga, who names the city:
Checking the schedule of other cities on the Clue tour Insta page, it showed a run beginning in October 2025. Since the foliage wasn’t feeling very fallish to match up anywhere, I looked at other touring Broadway productions to ID the other partial poster as Kimberly Akimbo.
Then I crosschecked cities hosting both and determined that Springfield, MO must be returning us to Missouri again (so soon???), because what clue could complete what Dusty is hiding other than “Find your MO”? (Maybe WY, WI or IN — but the tours weren’t going through there.) Frustrated by Springfield’s street view, I googled “Downtown find your MO” and no suspects turned up.
As soon as I removed the MO, a matching image revealed “cool” in Durham, NC … which hosted Clue in September of 2024. Solved.
Forgive a brief digression, but here in in Chattanooga I serve on the board of our historic Tivoli Theater Foundation, which is undergoing major renovations and hosting the Clue tour this month at its Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium sister stage, which celebrated its centennial this week last year. So Happy Veterans Day, and thanks to all who have served.
A total of 67 sleuths got to Durham this week. One of them is this previous winner:
The first thing we all do when looking at a new contest photo is to scan for the obscure clues — from satellite dishes to garbage can colors to roofing materials to soil composition, etc. Scanning for obscure clues this week, I immediately saw a building-sized mural that read “Downtown Find Your [word covered by Dusty the beagle].” I put “Downtown Find Your” into Google, and the building with mural came up (repeatedly) as located in Durham, NC. I hadn’t just identified the mysterious location, but did so in under five minutes.
But before descending into Google Street View, I had the “a-ha!” moment. This is the classic false-flag clue — like the out-of-state license plate from last week. I am not going to be fooled, because I know precisely where this photo comes from: Anywhere But Durham, North Carolina.
Thanks, I will take the coffee table book.
You can’t win two! Our super-sleuth in Albany writes:
Durham isn’t a small place. The 2024 estimated population was 301,870. It’s 116 square miles. Where in Durham is this building? Neither of the previous sites I searched give any indication. From the Etsy listing:
This awesome picture was taken in Downtown Durham, North Carolina. It is the backside of a building and has become the slogan for Durham.
Thanks, Etsy.
A brief detour from the building search is led by the UWS super-sleuth:
I’ve been in Raleigh on business, but not Durham, so no firsthand stories. But I just recently read about a trestle in Durham — located less than five minutes by car from our View — that locals refer to as the “Can Opener Bridge.” Apparently a vast number of truck drivers seem not to believe the posted clearance for this opening. Nor do they respond to the many posted warnings for over-height trucks to take an alternate route.
There’s a website devoted to showing video clips of the tops of trucks being sheared off as the drivers forge ahead. The clips are oddly satisfying. Here’s one:
I also enjoy the way this site describes the situation so succinctly: “The train trestle prominently featured in all the videos here has earned a reputation for its unrelenting enforcement of the laws of physics.”These days it’s comforting to know that at least some laws are still being enforced!
Next up, a sleuth who’s “back after a long hiatus from the contest!”
This view is photographed from the upper floors of the Durham County Main Library, looking west-southwest across railroad tracks that once carried the tobacco that built this city. The “Downtown Find Your Cool” mural adorns the back of the historic W.A. Slater Company building on West Main Street — a fitting motto for a town that’s spent the past few decades transforming from cigarette capital to biotech hub without losing its grit.
The railroad tracks in the foreground are a reminder that Durham exists because of geography and logistics, not plantation aristocracy. It is North Carolina’s scrappy middle child — too working-class for Raleigh, too ambitious for Chapel Hill, and perfectly happy being the Triangle’s id.
It’s not the library. Here’s a sleuth in “South Jersey, the Paris of the Northeast”:
This is less a “fun fact” than a sad one, but it looks from your picture like the rest of the commercial lettering to the right of “Downtown: Find Your Cool” has been scrubbed out somehow. Please see my attached picture of it in better days:
It used to include “Drink Lemon Kola 5¢” — an ad for a local franchise of the Lemon-Kola Bottling Company of Norfolk, VA, incorporated June 10, 1913, with the slogan “Everybody’s Drinking It,” despite the fact that the base of the soda was apparently “pure lemon juice” — and signage for W.A. Slater Co. — a men’s clothing store founded sometime around 1890 by Slater, Thomas M. Gorman, and T.J. Lambe, the last of whom also is featured in the signage for “Lambe Brothers & Co. Clothiers” on the left-hand side.
Another sleuth writes:
I truly enjoy your weekly contest. Although, to be honest, I couldn’t guess the continent much less the city/state/country 75% of the time. I don’t know how your regular experts do it. Only twice have I looked at the picture and exclaimed (to myself): “I know this one!” Two weeks ago, I knew Kansas City (I grew up in KC), and I knew the Power & Light building, and I even knew the Hotel Kansas City ... but I couldn’t find a photo of the hotel to even make a guess.
And this week I knew Durham. And the hotel. But again, trying to find a photo to help narrow down the exact window proved difficult. As I said, I don’t know how your experts do it. But it sure makes for fun reading! Thanks again for the contest ... I’m sure it’s a lot of work on your end.
Oy, indeed. Let’s hear from a “former paid subscriber who continues to be addicted to the contest”:
I thought I was pretty hot stuff a few weeks ago when I found Kansas City in two Google searches. But I topped that with Durham this week — my first single-search solve.
Thank you for providing this contest. It’s both an invigorating exercise for the mind and a brief respite for the soul from all the horror of the world.
That’s quite a marketing pitch. If you’re persuaded by it, here’s the link to subscribe —so you’re able to read the full write-up every week (along with the rest of the Dish offerings).
Another sleuth names the right building:
Hello! It’s been a few years since I solved one of these, so if I’ve done it, I’m sure many others have also.
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