Category: Contest

A reader writes:

Deciduous trees of some sort, mechanically raked beaches, the characteristic look of white lifeguard stands and jetties jutting out into the ocean, and something about the quality of the light on the water all say “New Jersey beach” to me. The big hotels of some sort in the back ground, suggest North Jersey, rather than South Jersey. I’ll take a flyer and say it is Ocean Grove.

Another:

Playa del Carmen, Mexico? The long jetty has changed in the 20 years since I was last there. And there’s much new construction near the beach, but the look is much the same.

Another:

That sure looks a lot like the “seedier” part of Malibu, near Pacific Palisades and just north of Topanga Canyon. Catalina peeking over the horizon to the right. I think I parked in that parking lot in the foreground on many an occasion in the ’70s.

Another gets on the right track:

I live on Lake Michigan, and this just screams large, inland lake.  Reminiscent of Rust Belt.  Could be any lakeside area in an arc starting at Buffalo, NY westward, and up to Duluth, MN. How about Erie, PA?

Another locates the right city:

The window latch looks American (I had one similar in Texas many years ago, never have had overseas); the architecture looks vaguely New England to me; the beach feels like a lake (not enough protection for it to be the ocean or a large sea), but for it to be a lake it has to be a large lake because you can’t see the opposite shore. Putting that together led me to the Great Lakes. The empty beach and calm waters make me assume it’s early morning – thus the shadows mean we’re looking north on a western shore.

So then it was a matter of searching Google Earth for a beach front with a uniquely shaped breakwater and high rise buildings in the background. After a lot of trail and error, that led me to the Loyola University Lake Shore Campus, where I was able to find Santa Clara Hall (the building in the right foreground with the square chimney and unusual atrium. I’d like to figure out the actual building, but I’m in Laos and my Internet is dodgy and I can’t get street view to open, so this will have to do: Loyola University Lake Shore campus in Chicago, looking north over the Santa Clara Hall.

Another sends an aerial view:

Another reader:

I recognized this view immediately! I lived in Chicago about 15 years ago, when my daughter was born, and we used to visit Rogers Park often. Our close friends lived a few blocks away in a rental on Pratt, overlooking the beach. It was one of the few affordable lakefront areas left. Love it there.

This is a view to the north from the Campus Towers apartment building at 1033 W. Loyola Ave., adjacent to Loyola University. It’s from a window at the front of the building, on about the 8th floor, with a slight northeast angle. That’s Hartigan Beach (though people tend to refer to the beaches informally by street names, and the part we see is at the end of W. Albion), one of a string of public beaches along Lake Michigan run by the Chicago Park District. The Rogers Park neighborhood borders Evanston, IL. If you follow the shoreline and go a bit inland, the small cluster of tall buildings you see through the upper left of the window is in Evanston.

I haven’t made a VFYW guess in months (years?). But I did come close on a couple. I have my fingers crossed on this one, but I’m worried that anyone who’s ever been to Chicago is going to recognize it!

Another:

That is the pier with the light stretching out into Lake Michigan, taken from south. On the spit of land in the distance at the top left of the lake lies the Northwestern campus. You can walk right out the city from Pratt Boulevard onto the beach. A beautiful spot, and a fitting photo; I live just a few minutes’ walk away and must now say goodbye, as I am leaving Chicago after nine wonderful years.

Another angle:

Another reader:

Other than the fact that this is the alma mater of Bob Newhart, I have no stories about the North Shore of Chicago. But I do have a story about how many of these window views I’ve identified:

#33 — Double bay in Sydney, but that was before I realized we had to identify the very window. And I e-mailed it to the Andrew’s address, not the contest.
#40 — Mission Bay, San Diego. Got the resort right, misidentified the porch one cottage to the right.
#76 — MS Galaxy of the Tallink Silja Line docked in Stockholm (won it, got the book, thank you.) 11/12/2011
#125 — Balmoral Lodge, Queenstown, NZ 10/20/2012
#131 — Glen Drive, Sausalito, CA 112/4/12
#142 — The Hotel Captain Cook, Anchorage, AL 2/23/13 (off by one floor. Damn!)
#157 — Tom-na-Criege Lodge in Onich/North Ballachulish, Scotland (too easy, I know)
And this one.

I know, as a previous winner, I’m not eligible to win, but going through the archives to get the right numbers of each brought back so many memories of fun Saturdays chasing some of these. I haven’t had time to go after all of them but this is a great game to play.

Another view:

Regarding the track seen above:

As an alumnus of Loyola University Chicago this week’s photo looked immediately familiar.  The picture is taken from the Campus Towers at 1033 W. Loyola – looking north to Hartigan Beach.  I ran cross country and track at Loyola.  At the beginning of the school year our morning workout would be to run two miles north along Lake Michigan to the Evanston border and back to campus – ending at Hartigan Beach where we would finish with push-ups and sit-ups.

The field next to Campus Towers is named for my former teammate and friend, Sean Earl, who died from cancer in the year 2000 at the age of 21.  Sean was a walk-on to the Cross Country team.  He didn’t have a lot of talent – in fact he struggled to make it through that easy four-mile run before the workout on Hartigan Beach for the first month of his freshman year.  But he didn’t give up.  He squeezed every bit of potential out of his body – a body which had a tumor that had been there since he was born – and yet wasn’t found until his junior year.

As you know, losing someone close to you when you’re young changes the way you see the world.  Thanks for providing a reason to think about him.  Thinking of him reminds me about what’s important in life.

On a more mundane note, another reader gets the right floor:

Well I think it’s just dumb luck that I figured out this week’s VFYW. With just a random sense that I was looking at one of the Great Lakes (not that I’ve ever been), and knowing that a view from that high up meant that the window was in or near a city, I started scrolling around Google maps until I stumbled across the Chicago geography that we’re looking at. Specifically, we’re looking north from the Campus Towers Apartment Building on Loyola University’s campus. The exact address is 1033 W. Loyola Avenue. Given the slant of the window and the positioning of the photo, I know we’re looking out of the furthest east window on the north side of the building. I’ll guess the 13th floor, since in every previous entry I’ve guessed too low, and the 13th floor appears to be one of the top floors in the building.

Only one other reader matched that accuracy, but this one breaks the tie by having correctly guessed a difficult view in the past:

Seemed pretty clear this was North America, based on the style of some of the buildings. My first thought was East coast, but the beach seemed too small and the water too calm to be the Atlantic. That left one of the Great Lakes. Seems to be taken from a rather tall building, given that the window is quite a bit above the surrounding 3 and 4 story structures. One house in particular reminds me of style of house that my grandfather built and lived in in the early part of the 20th century in Chicago. So that is where I started looking. It didn’t take long to zero in on the area near Loyola University, where the shore and jetty match the VFYW image perfectly. The picture was taken from the Campus Towers apartment building, at 1033 West Loyola Avenue.

Getting the window needs a bit more effort. The building has two distinctive sort of bay window shapes in the front. Given the angle of the window in the VFYW image, the picture was taken from one of the two columns of windows that angle toward Lake Michigan. The view also aligns almost perfectly with the structure/shape on the roof of the building across the street, which means that the image was taken from the bay windows on the lake side of the building.

Now comes the WAG (Wild Ass Guess) – which floor. I am going to guess the 13th floor (do buildings have a 13th floor?) counting the ground floor as 1. I circled the window in the street view below:

I have erred on the low side in the past, this time I am probably too high.

Not this time. One more reader:

Unlike previous entries now I have a story and a connection. I am so excited that I can hardly type this, but here goes. This is from Rogers Park in Chicago, until very recently my neighborhood. It is the far north of the city, just a few blocks south of Evanston (visible, barely, as the tip of Northwestern’s lakefront campus in the far distance). The picture is taken from (probably) the 9th floor or 10th of 1033 W Loyola Avenue (remember that most buildings in Chicago use the European system of numbering floors: ground, 1, 2, etc.) and your source is likely a student at Loyola.

I walked my dogs past this building every day for years and lived just a few blocks away with my partner. In the picture you can just almost see the roof of the building where we met at a New Years Eve party in 2001. You can see the “lighthouse” (a small navigation light that everyone calls the Lighthouse) on the end of the pier off of Loyola Park. It is a great place to take a date on a summer’s night for a walk and a kiss. You can see the tennis courts that some dog owners use as a fenced-in poop-zone and playground (I say this as a dog owner who never did that.) You can see the spot on the beach that needs to have all of the broken bottles and glass cleaned up before I will go out there again in bare feet (all helpfully marked on my annotated map.)

This is an area of Chicago that should be in much better shape. There is a great sense of community here, a lot of quirky shops, and a lot of neighborhood sponsored street art. People who live in Rogers Park tend to love, passionately, this offbeat neighborhood. The area around Loyola University (the location of the window) anchors the south of this wonderful neighborhood and gives the area a touch of campus life. There is a great world to explore in this photograph.

And yet the crime and violence is increasing and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. Just this past week a favorite bar a few blocks north saw the brutal beating of a regular who tried to stop a fight. Locals are worried that this sort of thing will get out of hand and a great neighborhood collapse into the crime and violence of more challenged neighborhoods of Chicago. It will take some effort and attention to save a wonderful neighborhood.

I am excited to see a neighborhood that I love in the contest. I love the idea that some of your readers will have the surprising realization that Chicago has many miles of wonderful beaches. That brings me a big smile.

(Archive)

A reader writes:

I’m getting a strong feeling of “Germany” looking at this photo. That blue road sign with an arrow closely resembles examples of German road signs I found online. I suppose it could be France or Estonia, but the architecture keeps me leaning towards Germany – as does the graffiti in the lower-right corner of the frame. I have no idea where in Germany, though, so I’m going to guess somewhere outside Hanover.

Another:

My sister had surgery in the Stanford University hospital ten years ago and when I looked at this week’s contest the red tile roofs and adobe colored buildings yelled out to me that this must be somewhere on the Stanford campus. Maybe student housing – lots of small buildings without too many cars. If I wasn’t six hours away I might even go drive around and try to find the exact location, but I’ll leave Google street view for someone who likes computer time more than I do and go back out to my garden.

Another:

I’m just shooting in the dark, but the architecture seems prosperously Eastern European, as does the signage. Lubljana, Slovenia?

Another:

First off, I was on vacation the first time you had a Luxembourg location, in Differdange (or was it Dudelange?), the famous one that nobody was even close to guessing. Since I had driven down the very street where that picture was taken just a day before leaving on that vacation, it was a bit agonizing to find out about missing the contest that week.

Analysis this week: First, Luxembourg is a tricky location because there is no Google street view, for whatever reason. But the geography and the lush, almost temperate-rain-forest vegetation makes this clearly in the Ardennes region. The EU standard street signs are a somewhat helpful confirmation. The architecture, being a mix of Belgian and French styles, both modern (20th century) and traditional, points strongly to southern Luxembourg. The lack of dominating large 20th century apartment blocks rule out northern Lux, which was heavily rebuilt after WWII, and neighboring areas of France and Belgium, where there are enough large public housing projects that you would not get this scene of predominantly small houses in the traditional red-tile roof style. Also, the southern towns in Lux have working-class neighborhoods like this, with relatively few slate roofs, just seen here on public buildings and those, like the French-style house on the right, with a bit of pretension to them.

There are a lot of American students at the University of Miami campus at Differdange, and I suspect this photo comes from one of them. My guess is of Rodange, looking south toward the hill to Titelberg, a Gallo-Roman site built on a bronze age settlement dating to 2000 BC.

Another:

I’m guessing Bucharest, Romania. I have no idea why, the photo sort of screams Eastern European. It could by Riga as well, who knows.  There’s this time sinkhole called “The View from Your Window” and I got to finish my financial household analysis and don’t have time to root round Google Earth. I’m going to be very impressed if this is gotten by someone who has NEVER, EVER visited this area, wherever the hell it is.

Another gets close:

Based on street signs and the cars’ license plates, I think we’re in France. I couldn’t detect other clues (no May fest brochure visible this time), so I have to make a determination on general grounds. The hills and buildings remind me of the Ardennes region. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fortress or castle was lurking just outside the picture. Sedan being one of the major towns in the area, so that’s my guess.

Below is the only reader to nail the right city:

Man, Dish fans sure do find some pretty places to visit. At first I though that this week’s view was in Eastern Europe based on those odd red roofs, so I spent several hours wandering through Transylvania. But the more I looked, the more things started to nag me, like the turreted windows and the color of the buildings’ walls, not to mention the flashes from the opening scene in “Beauty and the Beast” that kept rolling around at the back of my brain. Fast forward 24 hours, and I indeed found myself in a not-so-poor provincial town:

This week’s view comes from picturesque Sarlat-la-Caneda in the Perigord region of southwest France near the famous Lascaux caves. The photo was taken from a bed and breakfast called “Les Trois Jardins” located on the Impasse des Clarisses and looks due west over the southern part of town. For the sake of pseudo-preciseness I’ll guess that it was taken from the Monet bedroom on the second floor, though it might also be the Picasso loft above:

Amusingly, the medieval heart of Sarlat is just out of sight on the right. Were it visible, this would have been a much quicker contest because it’s similar to Mirepoix, a town that was featured in VFYW #136. Attached are pictures of the actual window, a bird’s eye view, and a shot of the ancient architecture in the town’s center:

More details on the town from Wikipedia:

Sarlat is one of the most attractive and alluring towns in southwestern France. It’s a medieval town that developed around a large Benedictine abbey of Carolingian origin. The medieval Sarlat Cathedral is dedicated to Saint Sacerdos. Because modern history has largely passed it by, Sarlat has remained preserved and one of the towns most representative of 14th century France. It owes its current status on France’s Tentative List for future nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage site to the enthusiasm of writer, resistance fighter and politician André Malraux, who, as Minister of Culture (1960–1969), restored the town and many other sites of historic significance throughout France. The centre of the old town consists of impeccably restored stone buildings and is largely car-free.

However, that reader has already won a contest before (and is most likely our all-time best player), so we have to go with proximity this week. The closest town to Sarlat-la-Caneda guessed by a reader is Beynac:

This was even tougher than last week.  I quickly settled on some town in France, but which one?? It probably isn’t Beynac, but there were a number of buildings with similar architecture there that I suspect is somewhere in the western interior of France like the Aquitaine region.  If anyone gets this I’ll be very impressed.

But that reader is also a previous winner, so we have to go with the second closest city:

Beziers, France? In honor of the curves.

Short and sweet, enough for a win. The submitter writes:

I’m thrilled to see my picture as the View From Your Window contest.  So, a little bit about this.  It was taken from the Monet room on the first (US second) floor of Les Trois Jardins, an inn run by a British couple in Sarlat-la-Caneda, in the Dordogne region of France.  You can’t see the gardens that surround the house – it’s slightly set off from the center, though quite close.  My room looked west, immediately over the rue JP Delpeyrat.  The medieval city is to the north.   The avenue du Gal Leclerc, the main street northbound one street over to the west, is under construction, and I’m not sure how much that’s affected the parking area behind.  A few hours later, and there would not have been a parking space in sight, as the crowds descended on Sarlat’s impressive Saturday market, filled with fois gras, mushrooms, local cheeses and nuts, (and local foods more generally) as well as arts and crafts; there’s also the usual stuff – household, clothing, bags: anything you might want.

I can’t wait to see what people make of this, but I wouldn’t ever get close!

(Archive)

A reader writes:

This is hard, hard, hard. No street indications at all, just some Spanish-style roofs and a mountain top of snow. I immediately thought of South America (it’s winter down there) and for some reason, I came to Santiago, Chile. I could be wrong and this is from some northern campus of the California college system, but I don’t think so. We haven’t had any appreciable amount of rain in sometime, so there’s no large amount of snow on the mountains.

Where in Santiago? I have absolutely no idea. I’m sure I’ll lose to someone who knows Chile like I know parts of New Jersey and will be able to pinpoint that tower and the angle of mountain with ease. Next time, pick something that gives the rest of us a chance, huh?

Another:

Unlike last week’s contest, there’s nothing for me to immediately grasp onto beyond the mountain range and the architecture. I wish I knew what that orange thing in the next courtyard over (in the lower right corner of the frame) was because that’s probably a clue. It could South America or it could be Spain. I’m going to guess Santiago, Chile and be done with it.

Another:

I don’t have time to do in-depth searching, but a Google search for “red tiled roofs” and “mountain” let me to Cuzco, Peru, which looks awfully similar to the images in the photo.  A further search for hotels in the area found several with arched windows, but I’m going to guess: The Hotel Monasterio?

Another:

Well, it’s been 20 years since I’ve lived in the area, but I think this photo was taken from Laguna Niguel, California, looking away from the ocean toward the Saddleback Mountains.  I think that is Saddleback College off to the right, or I might have guessed Mission Viejo.

Another:

Not a lot of time to do any serious searching this weekend, so I’m gonna just throw out a guess: Flagstaff, Arizona, based on my very initial impression that the mountain range is the Sierra Nevadas. Of course, it could also be somewhere in the Pyrenees.

Another:

Looks like the Caucasus to me, and I think I can spot one of Georgia’s famous watchtowers through the left window. So I’m guessing it’s the town of Mestia in the Svaneti region of the Georgian Caucasus, where I once spent one of the best weeks of my life.

Another gets much closer:

I don’t have high hopes here, but feel I have at least identified the region.  This picture immediately screamed Italy.  (Of course last time the contest screamed Italy, it was France.)  So the roofs are distinctly reminiscent of wine country, the vegetation gives it away as not being California.  The mountains are either the Alps or Pyrenees, removing Tuscany.  Last time it was the Pyrenees, so I’m going Alps.  Piedmont gives roughly the same temperament to the mountains as shown here, and the village size is moderate, but not large enough for a city like Turin.  Susa was the lucky recipient of the mostly random guess based on region and city size.

Another gets the right country:

Okay, this seems like one of the easier ones.  The view screams Andalusia with the fortress-like church in the mid-view and snowcapped Sierra Nevada in the background. The tiled roofs are very Southern Spain, and the arched windows look like a modern nod to old Moorish architecture.  I’m going to say this is in Sevilla, a few miles from the city center.

Close. Another nails the right city:

The overall location is easy – this is Granada, Spain, looking SE to the Alhambra, with the Pico Veleta summit in the background (at over 11,000 ft, this is the second or third highest mountain in Spain if I remember my elementary school geography right).  The picture is taken from somewhere in the Albaicin or San Pedro areas, but I can’t figure out where.  Good to see my home region of Andalusia in the contest!

Another sends a visual of the city:

Another reader:

I mistakenly went off down the monasteries and abbeys route first, before realizing it may be a castle. (It reminded me of the tower in The Name of the Rose, with Sean Connery – an oldie but a good movie…). After much searching, I found Alhambra. Aha! Depressingly, this looks like it’s going to be another easy one. Tours of Alhambra abound. It may be Palacio de Santa Ines, which gets pretty good reviews on Trip Advisor, but I’m not sure I have the angle quite right. I’ll guess 3rd floor, counting European style, 4th floor American-counting. My luck with guessing floors was good last week (I think I was one of the half-dozen that correctly guessed the seventh floor of the Sheraton Jiangyin Hotel).  Hopefully that luck will hold.  Two weeks in a row. Woot!

Another illustrates the right hotel:

Another names the right hotel:

This is probably hopeless, because I expect about a zillion people to get this one.  The mountains in the background looked a lot like the Sierra Nevada of southern Spain (really living up to its name “snowy ridge” in the picture).  The towers not only looked reminiscent of the Alhambra, but are the Alhambra!  Just north of the Alhambra is a deep ravine, so the photo would have to be taken from the hill on the other side, in the neighborhood of El Albaicin.  The street level views on Google don’t provide any picturesque views of the palace and mountains, but I was able to determine the approximate location by noting that the main tower of the Nazarid Palace aligns with the highest mountain, and noting the approximate angle of the tower of the Generalife (on the right, partly behind the tree).  The triangulation lines are shown on the first attached picture (I didn’t get the location exactly right – the actual vantage point is shown in red):

The next two photos show the Google street level views of the third floor room with the two round windows from which the contest photo was taken, and the buildings across the street, which matches the roof line shown in the picture.  The location is Hotel Santa Isabel La Real, Calle de Santa Isabel La Real, 15, 18010 Granada, Spain.

From the hotel’s web site come the final two photos, one with the viewing location indicated, and the second one a view from an adjacent room showing the same view as the contest photo (I’m sure the hotel’s owners are going to wonder why their site traffic just went way up!)

Since I couldn’t win the contest with my last correct entry of Sacramento, I probably have no hope of winning one of Granada (interestingly, you can see the Sierra Nevada from both cities).  I have been to Granada twice, but not this hotel; once while I was in college, and a second time with my Spanish girlfriend.

Another:

So I’m sure you’ll get a billion correct answers from all your readers who have been to the Alhambra and I don’t have the patience to try to narrow it down to the exact room the pic was taken but I ‘m guessing in the Nicholas Square area. But I do have a story that might be of interest.

I arrived in Granada via train from Madrid on Sept 11, 2001. I went to an Internet cafe to check my email and saw an AOL headline about the attack on the World Trade Center but ignored it because I thought it was about the attack in 1993. So I went back to my hotel and then out for a drink at a local bar a couple hours later. There was a TV on and people were really intent on watching it. I glanced up and thought it was just some Spanish made-for-TV movie. It was only after a sip of beer that I realized what was happening. I met up in my hotel lobby with three groups of American travelers (complete strangers all) and the eight of us spent the evening together getting completely hammered. The next morning we planned an outing to see the Alhambra together and through booze-hazed eyes took in the magnificent monument to Moorish rule of southern Spain. The irony of being in the last bastion of Muslim rule and culture to fall in Europe was not lost on me on the occasion of the attacks on the WTC.

An aerial view of the hotel:

Another reader:

Once again, a great contest.  This one brought way too many memories of a trip I took to Granada seven years ago.  I was living in Sevilla at the time, I took a train trough Córdoba for the day, and an afternoon/overnight trip to Granada.  I made it just in time for the “candlelight tour” of the Alhambra and knew I had to come back for the day tour.  Thinking tourist season had passed, I made no accommodations so I had to sleep on different park benches until I took a taxi back to the Alhambra, where I slept on a bench until it opened again.  Sadly, I was alone and too shy to try so many things I was offered that night!

Of the dozen readers who correctly answered the Hotel Santa Isabel La Real, the following reader is the only one among them who has gotten a difficult view in the past without winning:

The picture is of the Alhambra in Granada with the Sierra Nevada in the background, taken from the Albaicin neighborhood.   It appears to be taken from the “torreon-mirador” tower-view room at the Hotel Santa Isabel la Real.  In the small picture of the room you can see the radiators below the windows, which can be seen faintly at the bottom of the VFYW photo. Also included is a street view of the same building seen in the foreground of the VFYW:

FWIW, I’ve submitted two previous correct entries without winning (Madrid, Tirana), and had my own VFYW picture posted once.

Some parting words from a reader:

The poet Francisco de Icaza gave the city its most famous saying, addressed to a woman about to pass a blind beggar without giving him anything: “Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada.” (Give him alms, woman, for there is nothing sadder in life than being blind in Granada.)

(Archive)