(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
Painting the town yellow and teal
Gender role-reversal in birds
Cross-dressing stars of the Greatest Generation
A helicopter accident on a movie set that cost the producers the bulk of the budget — but at least they got it on camera
A sleuth who dispatched his daughter down to the view’s location
Yes!!! Woo hoo! Who knew that I was finally winning with a tough one? (I assume it was tough, we’ll see in the results how many got close … ) Tough call for which prize, but I’ll go for the VFYW book — a physical object that shows that I actually won.
Here’s our super-sleuth in Hells Kitchen with a musical offering:
I wanted to follow up on Belize, since I spent a wonderful week there in 1990. I’m surprised no one mentioned the country’s most well-known cultural export: punta rock. In Belize I was lucky enough to see the late Andy Palacio — who more or less invented the form — perform at an outdoor concert. Punta rock is a fusion of Black Caribbean and Latin musical forms, much like the country itself. Here’s a taste:
As for the contest view itself, I thought I recognized Belize City but couldn’t find the right combination of buildings on Google Earth. Still working on this week’s ...
Our super-sleuth in Japan follows up on contest #501, for which she had submitted the view:
Hi Chris! I feel as though every time I’ve emailed you in the recent past, I’ve apologized for it being so long since the last time. I’m back into term time in Japan and have a heavy teaching load Mon-Weds, so the Wednesday contest deadline puts a bit of a spoke in my ability to join in — unless I am VERY prompt about doing it over the weekend.
But I came into work early this morning SPECIFICALLY with the intention of emailing, even if I didn’t have an answer to the puzzle, because I wanted to say — alongside my amazement at how many people found the location (taken from my hospital room in Japan) — how touched I was that so many people added to their entry some version of “Hope the photographer is okay!” The hospital stay was for a broken ankle, after I foolishly slipped on wet pavement after a few beers, but I am absolutely back up and running … well, walking and cycling — running was never my thing!
The VFYW sleuths are truly a lovely bunch, and I’m honoured to now be both a contestant and a photo submitter!
For a virtual community, it does have a lot of heart. On to this week’s view, a first-time sleuth in Austin writes:
The photo is taken from a window in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, specifically in the Garment District / Times Square West area, looking roughly south from somewhere around W 37th-38th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.
From our super-sleuth in San Mateo:
There are four architectural clues this week. First there’s a distinctive and colorful mid-rise building near the center of the view with “Z” signage over the entrance. This structure stands out immediately due to its playful, graphic façade, which departs from the neutral palettes typical of surrounding downtown buildings. Its exterior features are bold, geometric color blocking — yellows, teals, and whites — combined with diagonal striping and even a stylized “cut line” motif (complete with scissors imagery), giving the impression that the building itself has been “cut and assembled” like a piece of design work:
image sent by the Japan super-sleuth
The architecture leans heavily into branding as identity, blurring the line between building and billboard. Despite this expressive skin, the building maintains a compact urban footprint: there’s no driveway, landscaping, or large setback. Instead, it sits flush with the street, reinforcing the dense, pedestrian-oriented fabric of the neighborhood and placing it in direct conversation with adjacent restaurants, bars, and mixed-use buildings.
Towering above it is a 20+ story, contemporary, residential slab tower with a repetitive balcony grid and glass-concrete façade. Then there’s the SELF STORAGE building across the street, with its company name and phone number obfuscated. Finally, we see Dusty sleeping in front of a sign showing “COUR___.”
So how should we Reimagine this week’s VFYW? Let’s use the “Z” building as a paintbrush and revitalize the scene:
In addition to “Hotel Z,” that hotel has another name — revealed by our super-sleuth from Santa Monica, who’s stayed there:
First time in a while I’ve entered the contest: all my routines are off, for not very good reasons. By the way, I did watch the Palisades documentary you recommended a while back; thanks for the steer. But I did have thoughts … and perhaps there will be some VFYW to put them into, in context.
I glanced at the VFYW this week and, as has become usual, I thought, “Another ugly overbuilt American-ish city. Condos all over the place? Vancouver, but the weather? Can’t be bothered…” Then I saw the stripy Staypineapple Hotel, which I stayed at in December 2022 — and from there it was easy to look across the street to the [hotel redacted].
Another prominent clue is covered by Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:
The most visible clue is, of course, the “Self Storage” sign. Needless to say, there are a lot of self-storage facilities in North American cities, so how do you narrow the scope of your search? The city looks like any other to my European eyes, but I guessed it could be on the West Coast — correctly, yes, in retrospect, but I couldn’t count on my intuition being right. So I thought a little, then googled “self storage” “downtown.” I don’t have the slightest idea of how frequently self-storage facilities are located downtown in US cities, but in any case, I found the hotel in about five minutes. Maybe it was just luck.
He also circled the right window, so it’s more than luck. Our super-sleuth in Hinckley spots another key clue:
First thought: Is that a gas lamp? Now where have I been that has street gas lamps? One has an entire Gaslamp District.
Here’s the newly minted super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:
My dream has come true: I have been awarded the title of Super Sleuth. Thank you — and you can send the plaque to my home address on file :)
Many parts of the photo looked very much like my hometown of Los Angeles, including the mix of modern and early 20th century architecture. I even noticed the five-globe lamp post, which used to be prevalent in the downtown area of LA:
But when I searched on Google street view from Spring and Hill streets, south of downtown looking north, not only could I not match the view, I could not find any of the five-globe street lights. Apparently they were removed from service — but a couple were preserved and can be seen around the City Hall Plaza, including this one:
Those street lights were designed and made by the Llewellyn Iron Works of Los Angeles, so I did a quick search and found they also provided the lamps to Portland, Oregon and a few other cities up north. However, none of those cities matched this week’s view.
Next up is the super-sleuth in Brookland, who began his entry:
I had to zoom up and convince myself this was an actual photograph, and not a painting. This must have been taken through some sort of screen?
A previous winner in Toronto thinks it’s smoke:
Some weeks I look at these and I’m utterly baffled. Others are easier. I initially thought last week would be easy, but I never got closer than Costa Rica or vicinity.
This week was easier. I wouldn’t have guessed this was [city redacted] from the first glance, if only because of the apparent smog. I assume it was forest-fire smoke.
The main clue was this distant but distinctive three-segmented building, which I later learned (after briefly chasing false leads in New York and Pennsylvania) was the back of the Spreckels Building:
This week’s view is gray because the photo, when it was embedded in the submitter’s email, appeared that way — but after I posted it, I realized that the attachment version of the photo, when downloaded and opened, is much more clear and blue. Here’s a screenshot version to see what I mean:
The file size for the photo is 15MB, so the compression process for the email version must have distorted the color. Weird. But the effect made this week’s contest a bit more challenging, because this city is famously sunny most of the year. Here’s a typical view from above, courtesy of Chini:
Here’s a newcomer to the VFYW naming that city:
For this week’s contest, I think it’s Sixth Street in downtown San Diego, looking towards Market Street. I don’t have any fun facts or stories about it — and that kind of cityscape and architecture really isn’t my cup of tea.
Here again is the Santa Monica sleuth, who had a scary experience in San Diego with his dog:
You and many of the sleuths will remember my adopted beagle named Dougal — specifically an Envigo beagle, from the 2022 shutdown of an appalling facility in Virginia. Here’s a NYT piece about the Envigo facility, under the headline “4,000 Beagles Are Being Rescued From a Virginia Facility. Now They Need New Homes.” (You have very likely seen something similar at Ridglan Farm, except here the authorities seem to be on the other side.)
My old dog Charlie — a beaglegänger of Bowie, Andrew’s dog — had died in June 2022, and I was planning to be allowed to have a bit of a life … but then the Envigo story erupted. About half my friends sent me the NYT piece, saying some version of, “You’re used to adopting beagles, and it seems like you have the space.”
The story had so much traction that adopting one of these sad beagles was highly competitive. The Humane Society had a kind of Underground Railroad, distributing beagles to adoption facilities around the country, and the nearest one to me in Santa Monica was in Chino. The only thing I knew about Chino was that it’s shorthand for “rough as hell, wrong side of the tracks.”
I declined to go, but a second site opened, at the Helen Woodward Center in Fairbanks Ranch, which is near San Diego. Envigo presented itself as adjacent to medical research, so it’s very likely that Dougal and his ilk had been destined for cancer trials. My sense is that because of this, it’s a plus if the dogs are genetically similar, so the breeding program is like the Habsburg family tree. It became clear that the applications at Helen Woodward were effectively an essay writing contest — and I won. Since I lived without children, I would be a good home for a dog they worried might snap. That apparently sealed the deal, and I went home with Dougal.
In November, the Helen Woodard Center wrote to everyone who had adopted one of the beagles, inviting us to appear on a telethon on San Diego KUSI on December 11th, in order to raise money for the center:
I hadn’t been to San Diego, but everyone said it’s a lovely city, and I had heard there was a dog beach there. I also wanted to see the desert, and Trump’s wall, so this was as good a hook as any other to hang a trip on. So, Dougal and I piled into the car for our TV appearance:
It poured with rain, depressing attendance. After the show, off we went to the dog-friendly Ocean Beach. We checked into a hotel right on the beach, where “dog friendly” meant they allowed Dougal — and charged an arm and a leg, for easily the worst room in the place. This is par for the course, but even by those standards, it was prison-like. No matter — we were about to have off-leash joy:
In the drizzle, fun was had and other dogs were met — until 5:30 PM. All of a sudden a loudspeaker system all crackled into life, with a tone and voice announcing that the lifeguards would be going off duty. I don’t know what it was about that noise, but it was clearly terrifying for Dougal — who bolted. And didn’t stop.
There had been one bolting experience before when Dougal had broken his own leash, but he ran home. We were not at home. And the sun began to drop. If you’re a dog owner, you’ve probably experienced a similar moment of panic. ...
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