(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.)
From the winner of our most recent contest:
Whoa! When you told me I was on the Correct Guesser list after contest #422, I figured it would be many weeks, if not months, before that could provide a tie-breaking advantage. Thank you for the very pleasant surprise!
I purchased two copies of the VFYW book back in November 2009 — one for each guest room in the house. Thanks to some visitors who were more light-fingered than I realized, both have disappeared over the years, so I’d love to have another copy. I promise to implement stronger security measures this time around.
That’s such a charming way to share the VFYW! After I sent that winner two copies, he replied, “Thank you for the generosity!” It’s a good way to indoctrinate houseguests to the contest :) From a recent winner:
We just got the book, thank you! And by the way, it looks like you drove right by Grand Ledge on your recent roadtrip:
I would’ve gladly met you for a coffee or beer! “Next time” for sure.
For sure! That stretch across Michigan was a fast drive to get my niece to the airport for her flight back to Portland after a family gathering in Grand Rapids. She had flown into Bloomington, Illinois to join my girlfriend and me for the 200th anniversary of Funks Grove — a storied town just south of the city — where I spoke on a panel of local historians. The anniversary coincided with the launch of a book I wrote about the famed Funk family, a project I started in 2018 during my Airstream travels around the US and a year after quitting my job at The Atlantic.
My favorite review of the book comes from Steve Vogel, a veteran journalist in Illinois who wrote the NYT bestseller Reasonable Doubt. (It’s about the case of David Hendricks, who was convicted but later acquitted of murdering his wife and three kids. I consume true-crime books like Fatal Vision and In Cold Blood, so I’m definitely adding Vogel’s to my list.) He writes:
An exceptional family on exceptional soil. That pretty much sums up a fascinating and historically underappreciated story told in Pioneers Built from the Soil Up … commissioned by a Funk family trust, researched and written by Chris Bodenner, a former senior editor at The Atlantic, “as a way to educate the younger generation of Funks and the generations to come, thus binding the family together and inspiring new forms of pioneering.”
But this is no family ego book. It’s deeply researched from primary sources and sheds fresh and occasional harsh light on important moments in America’s history and Funk family members’ link to them. […] Bodenner uncovers some scandals current family members didn’t know about, or at least didn’t talk about. But the stories made this book in more ways than one.
Many years ago I was driving in southern Spain and spotted a “Funk’s G Hybrid” sign in a field. That was like a touch of home thousands of miles away. Now, after reading Pioneers Built from the Soil Up, I have a firm appreciation for the Funk family and its consequential role in American history.
That consequence centers on Isaac Funk and his grandson, E.D. Migrating to frontier Illinois in 1824 as a dirt-poor cattle driver, Isaac within three decades amassed the largest and most valuable farm in the state. He served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature, helped forge the Republican Party, aided his friend Abe to secure the presidency, and served in the state Senate during the Civil War. His career reached a crescendo with the “Copperhead Speech,” symbolizing his fight against Dem colleagues who tried to stymie Lincoln’s war effort and obtain a “peace without victory” with the Confederacy. Isaac was a fascinating figure who embodied the American Dream in so many ways.
One of the “scandals” that Vogel alludes to involves one of Isaac’s sons, James, who was cut out of the family inheritance by his nine half-siblings. The legal team for James included John Todd Stuart — a congressman and favorite cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln — and Leonard Swett — one of Abe’s closest friends and advisers. Swett was asked by Andrew Johnson to help defend him against the first presidential impeachment in US history, but Swett essentially replied, “Thanks, but I’m too committed to this Funk case.”
The most dramatic moment for Isaac’s grandson, E.D. — a key player in the development of hybrid corn, which revolutionized farming — was his role on a war-time committee for Woodrow Wilson. The US had just entered WWI amidst a food crisis that threatened to further roil cities in riots and expose them to Communist influence from revolutionary Russia. Wilson’s first move after signing the Food Control Act — then the biggest piece of legislation in US economic history — was to appoint E.D. and 11 other men to stabilize the price of wheat. In a heroic scene told by an eminent historian, George Nash, E.D. pulled the committee back from the brink and prevented untold disorder in a time of war.
There’s a ton more to the Funk story — various civic leaders, a famous suffragette, an infamous con woman who plagued the family, the mobbing of a printing press, gun battles and knife fights, a whole saga on the Oregon Trail — but I’ve indulged enough. I studied history in college, and I was a history writer in NYC before jumping into journalism with Andrew at The Atlantic, so doing a deep dive into American history through the, er, window of the Funks was really gratifying.
Back to the window search this week, here’s a previous winner and his teammate:
We must commend this throwback to the Guatemala City contest. What we’re looking at this week is a view that has virtually identical framing: two tall buildings on two sides of a parking structure roughly three stories high, and a second parking area to the right. The window from which we’re looking is almost as challenging as that of a Guatemalan building that literally grew between Street Views.
I’m not sure if you’re deliberately courting controversy, but I think it is fair to say: you’d better have a picture of the fucking window, or there will be hell to pay! (Not least from the spicy dissenter in L'affaire Guatemala. We wish him better luck this time.)
Rest assured — here’s the sleuth who submitted the photo: “So there’s no controversy this week, I included a photo of the floor map and an outside photo of my wife waving from the window itself.” Here’s my zoomed-in version of the latter:
Oh hi!
From the super-sleuth in Ridgewood:
I’m expecting a lot of correct guesses this week. There aren’t a lot of US cities with this mix of big urban buildings set within a forest-y landscape, but [redacted city] is definitely the first that came to mind. Austin is another in that vein, but Austin was the VFYW city a few months ago — and you wouldn’t pull a Pittsburgh again, would you??
This sleuth thinks so: “Austin, TX, USA?” From our resident biologist in Milwaukee:
Hope you have a great 4th, and please send Andrew my sympathy regarding his mother :(
I also want to let you know how much this contest has meant to me. My job hardly ever allowed for cool animal facts, so being able to hunt them up for the VFYW and share them every week is tremendous fun. Thanks for everything you do to keep this going!
Her latest report — fantastic as usual — is down below. Here’s some sympathy from the super-sleuth in Japan:
My love and best wishes, if it’s appropriate, to your sleuth going through breast cancer chemo. I’ve had various friends in that situation in the past few years, and it’s never nice, although I can completely understand how enjoyable the VFYW must be as a kind of vicarious travel. All good thoughts to them.
Our super-sleuth in Bend gets to the details of this week’s view:
The cars and license plates indicate the US or Canada. The flat topography and verdure suggest the eastern halves of those countries. That leaves lots of area. Fortunately, the large building to the right is quite distinctive and turns out to be the Lutheran Towers.
Another sleuth knows it well:
Lutheran Towers are right around the corner from Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, where my brother’s family have been longtime active members. Hurray Lutherans!
My favorite coffee mug ever:
I was so disappointed when mine broke many years ago, but then I spotted one by luck in the mug cabinet of the Fellowship Hall in the basement of the little country church my dad served at the time and, well, I liberated it. And it brings me great joy every time I enjoy a heavenly mugful.
San Mateo makes the Lutheran Towers disappear:
Thanks for your comment on the first of my two VFYW Reimagineds for the Cairns contest. This week I’m taking a completely different approach: no graphic novel artwork; no ink sketches; no impressionism; no watercolors; and no cartoons. This week I decided to try “removing” some of the buildings!
Here I’m “removing” the senior living community:
And here I’m “removing” the office building:
The super-sleuth in College Park puts it all back together: “Google Earth can be made to effectively recapitulate the VFYW”:
From the beginning of the entry for the SF super-sleuth:
We are in a booming city in the Southern US. It feels slightly hilly, so maybe Austin is on the docket again? The arrangement of three rooftop parking lots/garages in the foreground should be a good marker to look for, and none turned up in Austin, San Antonio, or Dallas, but there were some tantalizingly close combinations of rooftop lots, so it felt like I was on the right path. Houston is too flat.
From a sleuth in Dallas:
I believe this is Tacoma, Washington. There seems to be a very rapidly sloping mountain at the top, mostly obscured by the tall buildings. It looks like a reflection of the Tacoma dome in the window of the building across the street. Also, there is a bike rack, indicating it is not in Dallas.
Here’s a guess at that “rapidly sloping mountain”: “Maybe that’s Stone Mountain we’re seeing in the distance if we zoom in enough?” Another sleuth:
I think this may be the parking lot behind the Hyatt Regency attached to the Tysons Corner mall in Virginia. If so, you wisely cut out the little sliver of DC skyline.
A previous winner gets much closer:
Montgomery, Alabama? No confidence in this guess, but is the photo perhaps taken from a building on the east side of Union street? The only useful clue I could locate was the reflection (top left) of a white domed building flying what looks like a blue-and-white flag. I googled it and got the Alabama state capitol building as a potential look-alike:
But it’s not a capitol building, as the ski-nerd correctly notes: “You can see the hotel’s pointed white dome in the reflection of the nearby tower”:
From the super-sleuth in Seville:
This was a tough one! All I had to start with was a major American urban center and the southeastern vibes I got from the trees. I turned to Google Earth to see if I could spot a skyscraper with that dome seen in the reflection. I worked my way from south to north along the Atlantic seaboard and tried Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Savannah, and Charleston all before reaching the right. All that took quite a while.
Here’s the beginning of the entry from the Berkeley champ:
It took a while to figure out how to approach this one. The fact that it’s a large, very flat city in the US, with a lot of new construction, was clear but didn’t particularly help. I was waylaid for a moment wondering what to think of a parking garage that puts its ADA parking spaces so far from an entrance. Not to mention, how often do you see two Porsche Panameras parked on the roof of a parking garage? (They’re the cars in spaces 424 and 436. A new one will run you more than $100K, and though neither one of these is new, the presence of even one tells me the attached building probably has some pricey condos in it).
Still, this information isn’t helpful. I also learned that forked TV transmission masts like those two in the distance are known as “candelabra towers.” Again, not helpful.
What eventually did help was reflecting on how thickly forested the right half of the photo is, so close to all these tall buildings.
Speaking of tall buildings, Giuseppe writes, “Seeing things from the other side can be an eye-opener”:
Chini opens our eyes further:
Team Bellevue names that city:
So it was an interesting but kinda grindy search for us this week, including a few mysteries — two solved, one remains!
QUICK READS
Wow, three adjacent parking structures. Feels like America.
Wow, those cars on the near upper roof — so many similar models. Is this a car dealership?
Mystery #1: Strange, awfully tall antennas in the background
Mystery #2: Intriguing reflection of a dome + flag in the top left corner
Mystery #3: Wait, behind that crane … is that a mountain? Impossible in this flat terrain. What is it?
Brown brick building (apartments? hospital?) with decorative cornice — interesting.
DIGGING DEEPER
We sorta flailed around for a while. We thought the antenna were distinctive and some digging reveals these style antenna are generally called “Candelabra Antenna.” While that’s perhaps interesting, it doesn’t get us much of anywhere.
Then we get befuddled by the curved “mountain” behind the crane. It can’t be a mountain, of course, but is it a stadium (impossibly tall?), or some decorative part of an adjacent building? No amount of googling for towers with curved rooflines produced anything of substance.
We really don’t know where we are at this point. Not enough foliage to feel confident, flat terrain, everything pretty generic.
The flag in the reflection draws our attention next — maybe blue over white, or a Ukrainian blue over yellow? We dig in here a bit and end up exploring the German city of Dramstadt — which could be a match, but the average age of our buildings in today’s photo is too young, so we move on …
In the end we just start bulldozing. ...
