Last week, we challenged you to solve a series of eight riddles describing unique New Haven locations, with a chance to win one of three $50 gift cards to a restaurant of your choice.
This week, with all the responses in, it’s clear the challenge was real. No one solved all eight, although, collectively, every riddle was cracked. The average number of correct answers per person was a hair under three, with 20% of respondents solving five or more and virtually every player getting at least one answer right.
Riddle #4, “I stand thousands of stories above the New Haven Green,” received the most correct answers, with a 76% success rate. The solvers must have realized that, here,“stories” are books; “above” means just north of; and “stand” is meant transitively, leaving one clear solution: Ives Main Library.
Riddle #2, “Even freshly updated, my bones are Yale’s oldest,” proved a little more challenging. 65% of respondents got the answer right: the recently overhauled Peabody Museum, where, among other prehistoric treasures, the famed dinosaur skeletons go back at least 65 million years. (A popular alternative answer was Connecticut Hall, Yale’s oldest surviving building. But its age, while impressive in context, can’t compete with the dinos’, and though some of its “bones” underwent a renovation five years ago, the Peabody and both its literal and figurative bones are coming off a newer and much more extensive set of updates.)
As 56% of respondents deduced, riddle #1—“I was built to conceal my age, yet from every angle my time is revealed”—refers to Yale’s Harkness Tower. Legend has it that architect James Gamble Rogers used acid to artificially age the building’s patina. But even if you don’t believe that, Harkness’s sharp, intricate Gothic architecture is meant to make the early 20th-century tower feel as though it’s been standing since the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, its four high and unobstructed clocks, one on each side, are visible from 360 degrees, distinguishing it as the only structure that satisfies the riddle.
Riddle #6, “My home is long gone, but my wall remains,” also references something that goes all around: the iconic outer wall of Edgerton Park. The public park used to be a private estate, its centerpiece a 50-room Tudor-style mansion built by the multi-industrial magnate Frederick Brewster for his wife, Margaret. After Margaret’s death in 1963, the land was bequeathed to the city—but not the almost impossibly opulent home, whose maintenance would have required kingly coffers. Anticipating that the home would otherwise fall into tragic disrepair, the Brewsters stipulated that it had to be destroyed. And so it was, as 31% of respondents must have known.
That’s just above the 30% who solved riddle #5, which I find particularly delicious: “Even on Christmas Day, I’m full of fas and las.” The word “even” signals the Christmas caroling motif as a red (and green) herring, and the riddle itself contains key phonetic elements—“fa,” “la” and “full”—of the answer, Mamoun’s Falafel, whose signage touts a policy of taking falafel and other orders 365 days a year.
Riddle #3—“Under a common name made proper, my once-threatened Rayn continues”—contains a conspicuous clue in the homophone “Rayn.” Yet its meaning proved fairly obscure. Only 21% connected it to Raynham, the 19-room, 220-year-old manor home from which the locally royal Townshend family once presided. In 2021, the family’s latest heirs decided to shed the home and its 26 surrounding acres, prompting fears that a heavy-handed developer would demolish first and ask questions later. Instead, the heirs agreed to sell to a group of preservation-minded investors who’ve now converted Raynham from an estate to The Estate, a wedding and party venue with, as the riddle observes, “a common name made proper.”
An intrepid 14% of respondents solved the second-toughest riddle, riddle #8: “Of my kind, I’m the first; for my kind, I’m the last.” It’s cryptic, yes, but so is the answer: Grove Street Cemetery, the first chartered cemetery in America and the final resting place for the people it serves.
Which brings us to the last and, with a 7% success rate, toughest riddle of all: “I’m named for a neighbor, even though I have none.” The answer? Next Door, the pizza place, which doesn’t actually have any next-door neighbors.
Okay, so who won? Yesterday we tallied up the entries and, using an automated number generator, randomly selected Ada F., Anna V. and Margaret S., who’ve respectively chosen gift cards to Sherkaan, Modern Apizza and South Bay.
Congratulations to those three, and to everyone who riddled with us: Thanks for playing!
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 1 features Grove Street Cemetery. Image 2 features the Peabody Museum. Image 3 features Harkness Tower.
