Grid: 10ish; Meta: same
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “City Blocks”—Laura’s review
Super short post since it’s the middle of a holiday weekend and I have some lounging to do.
This week we’re looking for a five-letter U.S. city. Is it BOISE? We’ll see.
The key entry is:
- [68a: Number of squares in the width and height of this puzzle’s city blocks}: THREE
So I figured I was looking for 3×3 sets of squares that spelled out the names of cities. And there they were:
WSJ Contest – 9.4.20 – Solution
Take the states in which each of those cities reside, and you get:
BALTIMORE == MARYLAND
POCATELLO == IDAHO (“… at the Princess Theater …”)
ANCHORAGE == ALASKA
CAMBRIDGE == MASSACHUSETTS
FORT WAYNE == INDIANA
The first letters of those states spell out MIAMI, which is a five-letter U.S. city and our answer.
Nice fun puzzle to start the weekend.
I wondered what other US cities had 5 letters, so I found this Sporcle quiz.
https://www.sporcle.com/games/teggers/largest-5-letter-us-cities
I got 14/41.
Thinking about city blocks, I first tried to divide the whole 15×15 grid into blocks of three separated by streets, and then spent some time looking at the clues that made up the streets…
Fortunately, my streets still left FORT WAYNE intact, so once I noticed that the rest fell together pretty quickly.