NHKeith
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WOW this is very COOL!!
boston where art though treasure??
boston where art though treasure??
any info on the NY one? I am local there and would love to try it out.
I have a solution for this.
There are subtle references about exile at work. The first word of the first line is IF, the name of the island Chateau d'IF where the Alexander Dumas character Edmund Dantes was exiled in the Count of Monte Cristo. Thucydides was exiled from Athens. Five steps in the area of his direction could mean five blocks, a bealach in Irish etymology, is about 660 feet distance.It is five blocks of distance between the Boston Public Library where Thucydides name is on the wall to the John Boyle O'Reilly statue on Boylston at the edge of the Fenway. John Boyle O'Reilly was exiled from Ireland to a penal colony in Australia where he escaped from Fremantel Prison. He based a book on those events called Moondyne. His character Moondyne Joe hides in a depression of collapsed limestone called a karst or a sinkhole which is a real place now named Moondyne Caves.
The later part of the verse contains clues to the poem The Landlords Tale by Longfellow which contains the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. In that story he sneaks past the British warship Somerset. Just across the Mass. Turnpike from the JBO memorial is the Somerset Hotel which has a section of the Charlesgate park in front of it. There are two circular depressions (just like the description of Moondyne Caves) lined with brick and a green light tower.
The rest of the puzzle requires understanding the meaning behind 'All the letters / are here to see' and using the illustration to line up the right pieces.
xieish, thanks for chiming in. You raise some good points. I find it difficult to argue to any great extent, but I feel it's important to respond to you're questions. I don't think of any roof as a "green tower of light". There was a time when I did, but now I think that line in verse should be taken at face value; there is actually a green colored metal light pole with a box shaped base and some lights attached to the top right next to the sidewalk near the depressions. The fact that they are close but not exact raises a conservative argument which assumes all the locations follow the exactness depicted in either the Chicago or Cleveland solutions. It is yet to be proven that the remaining locations follow that pattern. It can be we are in for a radical departure from that norm and the exactness we desire is transformed into something only similar in visual artistry and more precisely determined in other ways.
In this location, the precision of being able to stand in a spot and see letters of CITGO and the SS on the gates of the Somerset is where I think the verse takes us. I think there's a "homer" sort of reference going on where we may stand at a "base" assuming the stance of a baseball player aiming a swing at a white sphere in the direction of CITGO. Homer was a writer of epic poetry in Ancient Greece. I find there's something poetic in applying a reference to him given this verse begins with mentions of Thucydides and Xenophon.
Eric
I'm aware of the "st.louid" confirmation from the author. I understand he was being cryptic and I've doubted from the start that it was to do with the City of St. Louis without first determining there were no alternatives. I have a solution prospect that includes the St. Louis idea not relating to that city. A contact of mine has probed the spot and succeeded in finding an object located at 2.75 feet depth. I don't know if she's performed the dig yet, but she has a permit from the city. This St. Louis doesn't have to do with Boston.
My ideas in general have been refined to consider an organized effort to guide us to a location based on notable points of interest that have visual precision, by precision I mean a peak or a top or a pole that allows one to pinpoint a location in relation to the minimum necessary points given the situation. Say you have four points of interest that make a nice square, then it would be easy to find the spot in the center from drawing intersecting lines from the corners. A simpler idea might be to have three points where two points make a line and the third point indicates a spot on the line. Suppose you have a picket fence and only two points of interest, then the best spot to consider is where the two points intersect with the fence, and then a matter of which side of the fence to dig on. Protraction is another method where you have a point guided through something acting as a crosshair to a spot. I found this worked at a playground where I stood at a water fountain and looked through the makeshift aperture created by the stair slide structure. It pointed to a specific spot of sand a couple feet away from the merry-go-round.
Today is a good day, I actually solved a real treasure hunt. It's nothing to go on about, but it was unadvertised in the form of a poem written on just one piece of paper sitting on a table at an empty coffee shop. I was the first customer of the day. I saw it and it was immediately clear to me that it meant business. I had to leave the coffee shop and follow a path based on where the sunrise is in December and I found some large lot with gravel. The riddle in the poem said to find something that smells like green paint. I found a cement blob painted red, (red paint smells the same as green paint), and I dug to find a gift card to the coffee house. LOL. I'll tell you it took me awhile and it was a fun experience to get in touch with how hard our own minds make problems that are actually much easier than perceived. It didn't help that there were natural red herrings. I read that I needed to find a rock that was made by man and I came across a huge encyclopedia of ROCK music sitting on a table at the other end of the coffee house. I was stuck looking through the index for bands like Green Day. All that was just ME making unintended things fit. I see this process happening a lot with the Secret.
Now Boston, you like the Harvard Stadium as a focus. I'd be okay with that if you could show how it makes a good marker for a point reference. Either it helps guide us to a general area where details on how to locate follow or it IS the detail needed to locate.
I've gone to extremes to link everthing possible to discrete points of interest. The citgo letters and triangular shaped icon makes a good point reference at any distance. The green light post makes a good point reference. The circle makes a good point reference by facing it's center just as the woman in the illustration stands in the middle of it's arc. The double S's on the Somerset Building's gate makes a good point reference. There was a metal walled box (for what purpose I do not know) just next to the globe light post inside the fenced area near the north corner of that section of Charlesgate. I think the square-cornered shapes on the bottom of the illustration might have been the top of that box structure.
This is a far out verse. The strangest part to make sense is the Thucydides and Xenophon bit. I researched enough to determine Thucydides was in exile from Athens and lived north on his property in Thrace. Xenophon lived in Athens. Perhaps Th[e]race is the Marathon which goes along Commonwealth. "Those who pass the Colosseum," would be those running the marathon like Pheidippides did in ancient Greece.
All the while the Boston pairing has one foot in Greece, it has it's other foot firmly in Ireland. I build on the relation of the theme of exhile and Ireland by considering John Boyle O'Reilly who was exiled to Fremantle Prison where he escaped (see Moondyne). I also consider the length of a city block of 200m as being the unit for the five steps in his direction. From the Library, travelling 1000m on Boylston takes us to the John Boyle O'Reilly statue.
My theory on why Preiss hangs the word "if" at the end of the first line is because that was the name of the prison where Edward Dantes of the Count of Monte Cristo was exiled, the Chateau d'IF.
Parts of the image and parts of the verse echo the contrast of freedom and prison, exile and escape (running).
...maybe I'm just making this harder than it needs to be but I'd be very interested in knowing what someone thinks when they stand at that small area where view of the Citgo sign is limited and standing at just the right spot where you see all it's letters narrows it down to a small area of ground.