name that sidewalk / results

Name That Sidewalk — Results Archive

Seven times we photographed an anonymous stretch of pavement from directly overhead, published the picture with a clue or two, and challenged the community of the World Wide Web to Name That Sidewalk. Seven times somebody did it. Their results are recorded below, most recent first.

Editors' note. The contest is over. It ended after the seventh edition and was never revived. Nothing on this page or anywhere else on this site accepts an entry, and there is no eighth sidewalk. Winners are credited by the town they wrote from, as they preferred. The rules under which all seven ran are preserved at how it was played, and the terms governing them at the fine print.

Contest Seven

Clues were given, and a fantastic prize was offered. On 13 April 2005, the portion of cement, asphalt and wood photographed for the seventh contest was correctly identified as belonging to the walk of fame outside a wax museum in Tennessee. A reader in Tucson was the individual who cunningly identified the location of the sidewalk in question, having recognised not the walk itself but the particular way the wooden section had swollen and lifted in the summer of the previous year, a detail she described as unmistakable to anyone who had tripped on it.

The prize was a souvenir keyring in the shape of the state, unbranded, of a metal we were never able to name, awarded with our compliments and shipped in a padded envelope that cost more than the keyring.

Contest Six

Solved in the late autumn of 2004, after eleven days, by a reader in Halifax. The pavement was the apron of a municipal swimming pool in New Jersey, closed for the season and photographed in the rain. Our clue mentioned chlorine, which we considered generous and which four hundred people considered insufficient. The winning entry arrived with a note explaining that the reader had never been to New Jersey but had recognised the particular non-slip aggregate used by pool contractors of that period, and had then simply guessed the state.

Lucky guesses count. The prize was a laminated card, blank on both sides, of no discernible purpose, which we described at the time as a keepsake and stand by.

Contest Five

The entrance walk of a shuttered bowling alley in Ohio, identified in the spring of 2004 by a reader in Manchester, in England, who had never set foot in the state and worked entirely from the trench of newer concrete running across the frame where a gas line had been replaced. He was right about the gas line. He was also right about the bowling alley, which he deduced from the width of the doorway and the wear pattern of a great many people leaving at the same time.

He was awarded a promotional bottle opener, still in its wrapper, and asked for nothing else.

Contest Four

A rural post office in Vermont, in the winter of 2003. The photograph showed four feet of salted concrete and the corner of a bootscraper. It stood unsolved for six weeks, during which we ran two further clues, one of which was wrong. A reader in Burlington eventually got it by driving to eleven post offices in a single Saturday and comparing our photograph against each doorstep in turn, an approach we found excessive and admirable in equal measure.

The prize was a metal ashtray of the kind kept in the lobbies of buildings where nobody has smoked since the last century.

Contest Three

Solved inside four days in the summer of 2003 by a reader in Brooklyn, who lived two blocks from the answer. The pavement was the approach to a pedestrian bridge, patched so many times that the original slab is no longer present in any part of the frame. Her entry noted that she walked over it twice a day and had never once looked at it until we photographed it, which is the closest anybody came in seven contests to saying out loud what the contest was for.

She received a souvenir spoon, teaspoon size, commemorating nothing.

Contest Two

The pavement outside a long-closed cinema in a small town in Iowa, photographed in 2002 and identified some three weeks later by a reader in Ottawa. The clue was a single word, and the single word was wrong, having been transcribed from our own notes incorrectly. The reader solved it anyway and was gracious about it. To this day we do not know how.

The prize was a plastic pennant on a wooden stick, colours unrelated to any team, mailed flat.

Contest One

The first contest was solved in ninety minutes, which taught us most of what we needed to know. The sidewalk was the one directly outside our own front door in Brooklyn, chosen because it was raining and we did not want to walk far. A reader in Chicago recognised it from a photograph published on this site some months earlier, in which the same three slabs appeared behind a cat.

He declined the prize, a pen, and asked us to give it to somebody else. We did not, and it is still here.

On looking at pavement

Overhead photographs of ordinary ground are a genuine and old genre, kept far more seriously elsewhere than it ever was here; readers who find they have developed a taste for it are better served by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs collections, which hold an enormous quantity of American street and survey photography, much of it free of known copyright restriction. The seven contest photographs themselves survive only as they were scanned at the time, at the resolution of the period, which is to say badly.

The contest is closed. It closed some years ago and this page is the record of it, not an invitation. Back to the front page.