VFYW: The Buck Stopped Here

(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:

• The tallest building in any US state capital

• A famous knight made his home here for 30 years

• Spiders that take flight using an electrical current

• Clark Gable as a dead mannequin

• A mysterious white van that haunts Google Maps

From the winner of last week’s contest:

I can’t believe it, Chris! Thank you! This good news completely made my weekend, and I honestly cannot stop smiling. The super-sleuth from Baltimore was the one who broke the news to me, which made this win even more special.

I told myself that if I ever won, I’d visit the location. Too bad it’s not last week’s location; Parkfield would’ve made a bit more sense logistically and geographically. Instead, I guess I’m heading to Kuala Lumpur to try the smelliest yet surprisingly tasty durian fruit.

The VFYW is by far the most fun and interesting contest/game I’ve ever participated in, and I cannot wait to get my hands and eyes on your book!

Here’s a followup from our super-sleuth in Sagaponack:

Thanks for featuring the puppy last week. I think his litter was all spoken for, but if you’re looking for a new little friend, they do breed very cute bernedoodles at Walnut Valley Puppies, where he came from :)

Here’s an amazing coincidence related to last week’s Kuala Lumpur View: we were at the Watermill Center Summer Festival last night and I got to taste durian ice cream!

As background, the Watermill Center is a laboratory for the arts and humanities. Founded by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, it’s situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. Since 1992, Watermill has welcomed international artists of all disciplines to collaborate, take creative risks, and contribute new ideas to contemporary culture. It has a collection of over 8,000 artworks and objects, multifunctional studios and living spaces, a research library, and the archives of Robert Wilson and the center.

This year’s Summer Festival — “Limitless Time” — was set out at dusk and wound through the grounds, where nearly 60 artists turned the landscape into an immersive dreamscape of performance, sound, and light. The evening also unveiled the largest presentation of Robert Wilson’s sculpture and design in the US since his 1991 retrospective. It was an especially memorable event, as it was the first festival since Wilson passed away.

One of the artists last night was Hui-Ching Hsu, whose installation was called “Hybrid Truck”:

Inspired by a curious cultural overlap, Hybrid Truck begins with a simple observation: Taiwanese garbage trucks and American ice cream trucks play remarkably similar melodies while serving opposite purposes. In this live performance, a rebuilt hybrid vehicle collects trash from the audience while offering food scented like garbage. Blurring attraction and disgust, familiarity and estrangement, the work uses this exchange to reflect on cultural translation, memory, and the shifting meanings of everyday rituals in an increasingly globalized world.

And she chose durian ice cream as the “food scented like garbage”:

The funny thing was when I was told it was “trash ice cream,” I tried it and … it tasted like garbage. But later, when I knew it was durian ice cream, I tried it again and it tasted kind of fruity and good. So I understand a little better now the duality of durian, and how anticipation has a lot to do with perception!

From the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:

In the contest a few months ago, I marveled at the number of mechanics and car repair shops in Kingman, AZ, suspecting that many cars tended to die on the old Route 66. Well, I feel vindicated this week: the New York Times had an article with beautiful visuals, by a reporter who celebrated the centennial of Route 66 by riding his vintage 1970s BMW motorcycle for all 2,448 miles of it.

And guess where his motorcycle died? Exactly:

Here’s a window that is too challenging for the contest, but it has a cool backstory:

Recently, I had the good fortune to take a solo trip through Switzerland and Italy. My goal was to do it all by train and explore small towns and villages that were somewhat off the regular beaten path for tourists. The day before I was to take a four-hour panoramic train through the Swiss and Italian Alps down into Italy, I stayed for the night in the small Swiss town of Chur (pronounced, “Koor”.)

Being that Switzerland is on the pricey side (even for someone like me coming from San Francisco), I elected to stay in a hostel. The fun thing about this hostel is that it used to be an actual high-security prison — and before that, part of the medieval walls that originally surrounded the town. You can read all about the history of the medieval-wall-turned-prison-turned-hostel here.

The rooms and hallways were absolutely “no thrill” and still looked and felt very much like a prison. But even in my tiny modest room, I still had a lovely, slightly unobstructed view of the mountains I would navigate via train the next day:

Here’s a great endorsement of the VFYW from our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks:

I’ve been meaning to write several dissent emails to Andrew, but I keep having so much fun with the contest that I forget why I was angry about him in the first place.

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from the Plano super-sleuth:

Wow, not a legible word in sight. Indeed, not even a visible letter or number in sight. And the rain, fog, or smog obscures the buildings in the background. This will be a tough one.

The cars seem American to me, and the apartments adjacent to the parking garage (often as a “wrap”) are typically from 21st-century USA. The foliage and rolling terrain, plus this kind of newer, not-quite-suburban growth, strike me as somewhere south of the Ohio River and east of the Llano Estacado, excluding the flatter places like Houston. But I can’t see any license plates or windshield stickers to hint at a jurisdiction.

There are a lot of skyscrapers — too many for Louisville, for instance. So we are in a larger city, and one where the tall buildings are spread across a pretty wide band of the horizon rather than concentrated in a single downtown core. Some of the tallest buildings have pointed tops, so that seems to rule out Dallas, Birmingham, and Denver. So I started out thinking Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — similar foliage, similar terrain, lots of 21st-century growth.

From Sherman Oaks again:

The gray skies and wet ground made me think of the Pacific Northwest, so I started my search in Portland, but no luck there — same with Seattle and Calgary. The buildings in the foreground are all modern, so a lot of the East Coast was out. I went to some of the major cities in the Midwest but none had a pyramid building on the outside of the downtown area. And the Canadian cities were too dense with buildings.

I thought maybe I’d head south of DC for some more modern cities in NC and SC. In the back of my head I was thinking it could be [city redacted], but I thought it would not have so many skyscrapers in its downtown. I guess they went through a growth spurt in the last decade.

Our super-sleuth in Yakima clears things up a bit:

After a few weeks of easy pitches, this one was challenge, requiring a half-day’s work. Surely there can’t be that many smoky places in the country to search ... right??? A smoke-free view might have made things easier:

I’d really like to know what the tantalizing but inscrutable logos say on the white van parked in the corner rooftop spot of the parking structure. It’s a fixture not only in the view, but also in both Apple Maps and Google Maps.

Also wondering about the white van is our guy in Hinckley, OH:

Other sleuths may have been able to unlock the company name and other info from the service van on that distant parking deck, but for me it remained elusive. I’ve sent out into the wild nearly 20 service vehicles for my company, and I follow the “legibility” rule of one inch of lettering/logo = ten feet of viewing distance. My current “rolling billboard,” high-top Sprinter vans all have our name and phone in lettering that should be visible from 400 feet.

Also focused on the van is our super-sleuth in Saint George:

Interestingly, on every Google Maps/Earth view I could find, that same d*$% van is parked in the same spot:

Perhaps it’s been abandoned after some nefarious event and we should send the police to check on it. Either that, or it’s gotta be a glitch in the matrix. (Someone will, of course, point out that these likely have the same source, but that’s just trying to explain it away. Our submitter’s photo puts the lie to that! ;)

Here’s a city guess from the Riverwoods super-sleuth:

Seems to me that the only clue is the silhouette skyline. Newark, NJ? This is definitely a WAG. Otherwise somewhere in Canada.

The view from your Chini:

Our super-sleuth in Alexandria sees Philly:

I’m guessing that this is a view of the Philadelphia skyline from somewhere south of the city off 95. Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr were too far and didn’t have any tall enough buildings, and I couldn’t find anything in Wilmington DE that looked right. Drexel Hill wasn’t far enough, so I’m thinking somewhere above a Chester parking garage.

The Brookline super-sleuth also thought Philly — at least initially:

I was feeling a little rusty after being away from the contest for a while, so I wracked my brain to come up with large American cities with clusters of tall buildings spread out a bit. I thought Philadelphia at first, but the skyline didn't seem quite right, so I searched various urban areas looking for pointy skyscrapers in close proximity, and I soon arrived in [city redacted].

Focusing on the skyscrapers is our super-sleuth in Tewksbury:

I had an unexpected but fortuitous path to this window ... I didn’t recognize anything in the view, nor could I find any legible text, even when fully zoomed in. I decided to see what I could do with this building:

I started searching for “skyscrapers with pyramids on top,” and after filtering out the Transamerica building in San Francisco, I ultimately came across the Bank of America plaza in [city redacted]. It seemed obvious that this wasn’t the pyramid in this week’s view — but hey, look at that; there are other buildings with pyramids on top in the same picture, including this promising one:

That seemed good enough to start exploring, and I was pretty quickly able to identify other buildings in the skyline, including 361 17th St NW, aka the one that looks like a giant taser:

Our super-sleuth on Park Avenue throws out a WAG — in the right region of the US:

Sorry, been completely jammed this week, and haven’t had a chance to look properly. I think Charlotte, NC, but I’ll dig a little more if I get some time.

Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, names the right state:

Over time, every VFYW player develops their own set of heuristics. One of mine states that a downtown area with high-rise buildings and surrounded by lush vegetation is most likely in Georgia.

Another writes, “I am not a subscriber, but I believe, from the skyline, that the photo was taken in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.” Yep. And our Intrepid Couch Traveler hit the streets:

While I dragged Couchella all over suburban Atlanta looking the VFYW, ChatGPT somehow convinced her to become an influencer with her own Instagram account.

Our married team in Falcon Heights was also flummoxed in Atlanta:

Deb narrowed down the search from all cities in the world to Atlanta, but now we’re stuck as to the location of the commercial building from which this pic was clicked. Possibly the neighborhood of Bolton. No more time.

Here’s a heartwarming entry from our Burner super-sleuth:

The skyline immediately says Atlanta, but the rest is one big question mark. If this were outside of the US, I would have happily spent hours looking for a hotel with a parking structure across the way with rooftop parking. Not this week.

By the way, as you know, I met the son of my nephew last weekend. (I learned from everyone that he is my GREAT nephew, not grand.) He’s adorbs — those chubby legs!

And that VFYW of the house was taken in Hopkins, MN.

Here’s our window magician, San Mateo:

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) handles more passengers than any other airport in the world, with over 100 million travelers annually. Atlanta is not the largest city in the United States, but its central location and extensive flight network make it one of the most important transportation hubs in aviation.

Another reason for ATL’s success is its role as Delta Air Lines’ largest hub, along with significant operations from several other airlines. The airport’s layout, multiple runways, and seven concourses allow it to move enormous numbers of passengers while maintaining a steady flow of aircraft. Because so many flights connect through Atlanta, millions of travelers pass through the airport each year even if the city itself is not their final destination.

I mention this because this week’s Reimagined is reimagining the parking lot in front of our window as ATL runway 27R, with a Delta flight accelerating down the runway for takeoff. On the other side of the runway is the passenger terminal: