VFYW: A Bridge Not Too Far

VFYW: A Bridge Not Too Far For contest #502, we explore a vibrant city with a high reputation. (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: Lots of sleuths entering the contest for the first time A bittersweet Titanic tale A demonic horse An impressive dude named Dick Bull testicles! Here’s our super-sleuth in Prince George commenting on last week’s victor: It was a literal LOL when I got to your naming of the winner last week! San Antonio, Texas, USA???? Congrats to the winner for a most unexpected (and entertaining) start to the next 500! A long-lost sleuth — who’s only emailed once before, in 2010 — exclaims, “You quoted me in last week’s write-up!” I got a kick out of seeing a few sentences from my entry for the Brookline contest in September 2010 (I’m the guy who said my girlfriend and I had our first hug on the sidewalk outside the building). Happy to report we’re still together and have two kids (ages 9 and 3). I haven’t entered a guess since then, but I still follow the contest every week and am starting to introduce it to our older daughter. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. It’s always so awesome to hear from sleuths who have followed the contest for so many years, even if they rarely if ever participate. But watching is a form of participation! Here’s another followup — from our resident ski nerd who writes our slopes report every week: My turn to nerd out on the window location: the submitter of last week’s view from the Chūbu Rōsai Hospital said they were in room 621 and circled this window: But the hospital’s floor plans show eight floors, so the circled window is on the 5th floor, not the 6th. Several of us circled windows on the floor above (the 6th floor). It’s always tough to confirm whether a view submitter circles their own window accurately. A sleuth in Buffalo circles back to last week’s view: I’ve been searching each week but have been very busy — between work and getting every cold or virus known to man! Last week I knew it was Japan and checked Osaka, because I’ve been there before. I looked for hotels with a viewing platform and found the exact same railing. Success! Except the satellite view had none of the buildings from the view. Then food poisoning hit. I never sent an entry for Japan. Here’s our super-sleuth in Austin (who used to do our cocktail column): Before I get to my window entry, let me apologize for my lack of entries over the past few weeks. I’ve still been following the contest and finding the windows, but I procrastinate in writing up my entries, and before I know it, it’s Saturday morning. Since I retired my mixology column, I haven’t had a whole lot to add anyway, and you’ve definitely got your hands full with the impressive amount of entries you have to sift through and edit. (I still read the contest results voraciously.) I’m especially bummed that I missed out on the contest #500 recollections request, so I’m including my thoughts on what the VFYW has meant to me over the years. I started my window sleuthing 13 years ago, in 2013. It was a bright spot in a bleak chapter of my life, when my marriage of 21 years was falling apart. My first successful window find was #171 (Fayetteville, Arkansas). My second find didn’t happen until four months later (#189, Phoenix), which shows how bad I was at it at first. My skills at finding the locations grew, and by the end of 2014, I was finding about half the windows each week — until I finally won the contest in October of that year (#226, Providence). The VFYW book has been on my coffee table ever since. Like many of the other sleuths, the greatest things the contest has given me is that feeling of triumph at finally tracking down a difficult location. Digging for clues, deciphering barely legible text, scanning coastlines in Google Maps for hours until I find one distinctly shaped cove or marina. There’s no other feeling like it. It truly never gets old. But looking back, what really stands out to me is how the contest results have transformed from a simple breakdown of wrong guesses, correct guesses, and choosing a winner to what it is today: a detailed wealth of historical, biological, and cultural knowledge about a specific place in the world. It’s so well done that I end up feeling like I’ve traveled to these locations myself. Our good friends were planning a skiing trip to Japan, staying in Hokkaido. I told them to check out Niseko (#362), describing the town like I had been there. The contest has made me much more worldly than my actual travels would indicate. I went back through the archives to try to nail down the moment the vibe of the weekly results posts shifted from contest results to a collection of curated columns. There’s no bright line; when the column returned with the Weekly Dish in 2020, you included verses from the “VFYW Poet” in many of the entries. But it was #274 (Somerset Village, Bermuda) when you published the first postcard by A. Dishhead: As a graphic designer, I appreciated the detail he (or she) put into it. The postcards kept coming and the column got longer and more diverse from then on, culminating in what we have today: reports of such varied and interesting subjects that I’m perpetually amazed by the amount of effort you put in every week. It’s astounding, appreciated, and treasured. So grateful for that VFYW tribute. Another one comes from our super-sleuth in Ridgewood: I wanted to chime in on the celebration of the 500th contest. It’s kind of funny how the contest has seeped into other parts of my life. For example, a friend of mine who lives in Philadelphia recently sent me a photo of their cat. From that I was able to pinpoint their exact address, which they found both simultaneously disturbing and impressive. Here’s a multi-pronged followup from our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City: Thanks for last week’s write-up, and I realized I had an error: the current kanji for Nagoya is 名古屋, not 明古屋. The semantic meaning of the three characters is “Famous-Old-House,” but they sounded like “Nagoya” in Japanese. I also have a quick followup on the Vancouver Convention Center (mentioned by the Brookline sleuth in contest #500). I saved a photo (seen below) from 2018, to show how nice the Canadians treat tourists; they remind you not to drink “non-potable water” from the toilets and urinals: For the 500th celebration, I wanted to say something like: Chris, the next 500 will be easier. This had been true for my 1,000-mile drive from Ann Arbor to OKC last year, when the first half of the trip ran into several proto-tornados. However, when I looked through the proverbs in various cultures, I noticed that they tend to cover both ends: some say that the beginning is the hardest part of the journey, while an equal amount of them say that the end — the closing — is the hardest. I guess we should all enjoy the flow in the long-middle. On to this week’s view, a sleuth sees the Middle East: Jerusalem, Israel? The Chord’s Bridge? Too lazy to really search, and much too busy ignoring all the stuff on my To Do List. Hope things have been getting better for you, Chris. Happy Spring! The warm weather is finally starting to stick in DC. This next sleuth sees Europe — specifically Rotterdam, Netherlands: I suspect a lot of people are going to get this one right. The Rotterdam cruise port terminal is about 50 meters down the street, where the second building from the left is, before the bridge. I departed from that cruise port two summers ago on a trip to Norway and Iceland, and parked my car (we drove to Rotterdam from Berlin, where we live) in a private person’s garage about two blocks to the rear of where that photo was taken. Another writes simply, “Boston, USA.” Right country. Another Boston guess: Hello VFYW! This looks to me like Boston. Feels like we could be in the Courtyard Marriott looking north toward Charlestown and getting kind of a strange angle on the Zakim Bridge. From a sleuth in Colorado Springs: I know exactly where this is! Why? Because I used to be an associate at the international law firm, Hogan Lovells — the logo of which you can see in the southwest corner of the building below: Maybe you blurred out the logo to avoid giving it away? That lime green is unmistakable for anyone who worked there after Hogan and Hartson merged with an English firm to become Hogan Lovells. In all events, I spent many a long night reviewing documents, reading cases, drafting memos, and taking depositions in that building. P.S. That office of Hogan Lovells has a fairly august alumni list, including Ty Cobb, Cole Finegan, and Judge Regina Rodriguez. Nationally, Hogan alumni include Chief Justice John Roberts, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Senator Josh Hawley, and many more! Here’s the Buffalo sleuth again: I finally recovered from my food poisoning, and I noticed in this week’s view an American flag. Then I googled “white single mast bridges USA” with no luck. After multiple other avenues getting me nowhere, I noticed people walking around on bridge and added “pedestrian” to the search and the view popped up! I actually thought it was over water, but it’s actually for rail lines underneath. Walking around in satellite view, all the buildings were there! Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods also focuses on the bridge: I’ve often admired how sleuths use a concise Google phrase to locate identifying clues in a view and then share that phrase. Many times I’ve back-checked their phrases, found what they found, and became more determined to find views like them. Well, I’m proud to admit that it worked for this week’s view — here’s my winning google phrase: “cable stay pedestrian structure in us urban city downtown near river” Here’s Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome: I can easily imagine everyone rushing back to contest #492 (Kuching, Malaysia) to find out the name of that odd kind of bridge they can’t remember. “Hmmm… where is it? Oh, there it is: cable-stayed pedestrian bridge.” Revealing the name of the bridge is our super-sleuth in Brookland: First, a shout-out to the sort of website that used to make the internet a truly great place, the sort of place that search-engine-optimization and social media have mostly crowded out, where one person’s niche interests are shared with the whole world: this list of cable-stayed bridges provided me a very reasonable list to search through to find this week’s VFYW. By some stroke of luck, it was a top Google hit for “cable stayed bridge in the US.” We are, in fact, looking at the Millennium Bridge in [city redacted]. With bus lanes, bike lanes, and tall-ish buildings, I figured it had to be a sizable left-leaning city; but even without those clues, it would have been a very reasonable list to power through. Eerily, I was just in this city last week and thought about taking a window view from my hotel room, but decided that once the give-aways would be blurred out, it wouldn’t be a very interesting or satisfying view. Just as well, since this VFYW is a much better contest photo than I could have provided. Here’s Chini showing the city from the sky: Recognize it yet? San Mateo muses over the Millennium Bridge: Looking at the VFYW, one is immediately struck by the dramatic curved façade of reflective glass on the building. Unlike a typical flat curtain wall, this section bows inward, creating a concave surface that gathers and compresses reflections from its surroundings. The effect is visually striking, pulling pieces of the neighborhood into a warped composition. Given its highly reflective nature and its position along the street, one might hope it would capture the Millennium Bridge, which is along the same corridor. Yet, the bridge is conspicuously absent from the reflection. The reason comes down to orientation and reflection geometry. First, the curved section of the building does not actually face toward the Millennium Bridge. Even though the bridge appears centered in the viewer’s line of sight, the glass façade is angled in a different direction. For a reflection to occur, light from the bridge would need to strike the glass and bounce toward the viewer — but that alignment doesn’t happen here. The inward curvature (concavity) reinforces this effect. A concave reflective surface doesn’t behave like a simple flat mirror; instead, it gathers light from a specific range of angles and redirects it in a more focused way. In this case, the façade is effectively “looking” at — and therefore reflecting — parts of the environment that lie off to the side: neighboring buildings, patches of sky, and sections of the street that fall within its reflective field. As a result, even though the Millennium Bridge is large, nearby, and visually dominant from the viewer’s perspective, it lies outside the angles that the curved glass can capture and return. The building isn’t failing to reflect the bridge — it simply cannot see it from that orientation. But fortunately, the VFYW Reimagined isn’t limited by orientation and reflection geometry. It’s not even limited by the physics of light, or anything really — other than imagination. So let’s imagine: Next up, a sleuth who “always looks, but seldom even gets the right continent” names the right city: I recognized the Millennium Bridge immediately — I think the first time I’ve ever come close to getting a VFYW right.