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TwitterSelf-sniping is the biggest problem in the programming industry among people my age. In my day, you didn’t get this way without Needing To Know for no good reason. Worse, we grew up without much internet, so when we Needed To Know back in the day, we had to figure it out with protractors and Swiss Army knives, so we’re super proud of figuring things out with artificial handicaps because the latest generation is basically Borg and this is all we’ve got.
Upshot is when my friend Elliott posted this:
… I Needed To Know where he took the picture, instead of doing something obvious like looking at his Facebook profile or asking him.
It was harder than you might think, which I only surmise because it was harder than I thought. I can’t speak for other cities, but most New Yorkers don’t know our own skyline all that well. We see it from particular perspectives: the JMZ bridge1[1] approaching the eastern edge, southish Brooklyn looking up at the financial district (FiDi), and the occasional rooftop with a random view. Hoboken residents are more familiar with the NYC skyline than any New Yorker will ever be, because the majority of New Yorkers see it from the ground, where it looks less like a skyline, and more like a homogenous concrete prison with an unusual number of Thai restaurants. Worse, people keep building things, so there are at least four or five new sky fingers since the last time I got a good look at it.
This made the first task of getting an angle difficult. I had two key indicators: the Empire State Building (ESB) and Some Other Tall Buildings (SOTB).
My natural inclination was to assume it was taken from some place in Brooklyn, because I had mostly seen the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn and that view is distinctly broken into Tall Stuff on the Left and Tall Stuff on the Right Sort of Near the Empire State Building. The left is FiDi and the right is Midtownish and Up, separated by the villages where the bedrock won’t support Ayn Randian phallus enhancement.
I dismissed Brooklyn quickly, however, because there should have been a river somewhere between Elliott and ESB, and even if the river was obscured by the angle, the giant Brooklyn buildings along the East River would have been visible. My next thought was from the North, as that could have been an angle that put FiDi and ESB in the right places, but that angle at that distance probably would have included Central Park, along with the other tall buildings north of ESB.
I began to suspect my problem was the SOTB were not in FiDi, and a quick Google search confirmed that whatever the angle, FiDi doesn’t look like that. An embarrassing number of searches later, I determined that the shiny things on the left were Hudson Yards. These buildings are in plain view at the end of my walk to Biricchino2[2] two out of every five lunch hours, so I would be doubly embarrassed about that if looking up was something expected of people who commute to Manhattan.
If you do deign to look up, this is the rat level view.
I had an angle. This put the photo origin somewhere around here:
I couldn’t identify the black-rimmed rectangle building in the middle of the picture, so I started looking for a three-lane street with a slight rightward bend. Unfortunately, there are a lot of streets in this part of Manhattan.3[3] The only points in my favor were the distinctive crosswalk patterns and the mono-directional traffic.
Not enough for a definitive ident, but enough to start narrowing down the possibilities.
Working from a top down perspective in Google maps put me at a disadvantage. I could infer the general shape of the road and some things to look for, but rooftops have relatively little indication of facade, so I needed to hit the pavement, in a way that didn’t involve me getting out of my chair or doing anything besides clicking a mouse in my climate controlled apartment, so I hit Google street view. This is the power we get for giving up the existential notion of privacy, and I’ve made my peace with it.
From here it was a process of intuition and elimination. Find a subtle bend in the road. Look for the odd white building.
The annoying thing about street view’s power is that it occasionally lands inside a park or a store, which is impressive, but also, despite my aforementioned inner peace, creepy. More importantly, it’s useless in 99 percent of tasks that drive a person to use street view. After a few of these misfires and half a dozen failures, I found my whale:
Fucking 7th avenue. Now it was a matter of finding where on 7th avenue. I was back to matching crosswalks, which, due to optical issues and city maintenance, didn’t quite match up. I looked for the triangle pattern at the bottom of the picture, and backed my way through street view until voilà:
The gray building was a hard match in shape and color. Upon exiting street view, a business name caught my eye: Squarespace.
Elliott is a software engineer. I confirmed my answer.
At some point, my boss will probably read this, and despite being in charge of an engineering team, will probably have some questions. It’s not like I was doing anything that could turn into a white paper, which is the difference between sniping yourself in the foot and sniping yourself in the job. Fortunately, as a former amphetamine addict, I have an answer for this.
