The race is closed, so here is how it worked.
Seven ciphers, one answer each. The first letters of the seven spell the city and the state. Eight fields at the portal, all eight scored. Every answer below is what the grader accepted, including the spellings it forgave and the ones it did not.
Clue One · The Pastel City
Answer: MODERNE, OCEAN DRIVE
The clue asks for two things: the style of the buildings that look like ships, and the street they face.
The district is Miami Beach's Art Deco Historic District, saved by preservationists who organised in 1976. Art Deco names the whole district. The clue is careful about that, and asks instead for the word used for the ship-shaped buildings: the porthole windows, the railings, the racing stripes. That word is Moderne, as in Nautical or Streamline Moderne. The buildings face Ocean Drive, and Ocean Drive faces the Atlantic.
Accepted: MODERNE, OCEAN DRIVE, with or without the comma or a dash · NAUTICAL MODERNE · STREAMLINE MODERNE · any casing. Not accepted: ART DECO (that's the district, not the ships). MIAMI MODERN or MIMO, which is a real Miami style, but a later, post-war one from North Beach and Biscayne Boulevard, not these buildings. Either half alone: the clue asks for both.
Meta letter: M
Clue Two · The White Powder Years
Answer: INFAMOUS
This is the softest clue in the pack, and deliberately so. It hands you the three initials outright: I, N, F. The last step is a single word that carries all three beginnings and describes what the city became in the 1980s.
Infamous.
Not accepted: INFAMY, which names the condition. The question asks for the description.
Meta letter: I
Clue Three · The Ellis Island of the South
Answer: ARRIVAL
This is an acrostic. Read the first letter of each paragraph:
A city within a city · Refugees arrived · Running from one government · In 1965 · Very quickly · A tower that outlasted · Look at the first letter
The seventh letter comes from the instruction itself. Anyone who didn't count that line as a paragraph was left with ARRIVA, and the question beneath it (what does this tower represent?) finishes the word.
The tower is the Freedom Tower, built in 1925 for the Miami News. It became the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center, where arrivals from Cuba were processed and given their first papers. A correction from the Puzzle Master: the clue dates this to 1965. The center actually operated in the tower from 1962 to 1974. The acrostic doesn't depend on the year.
Meta letter: A
Clue Four · The River of Grass
Answer: MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS
No cipher here, just recall. The Everglades are not a swamp but a river, sixty miles wide and inches deep. The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) gave the place its lasting name. Its author spent the rest of her life defending it and died in 1998, aged 108.
Accepted: MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS · MARJORY DOUGLAS · the MARJORIE spelling · with or without the middle name · any casing.
Meta letter: M
Clue Five · The Salt and the Noise
Answer: INLET
The word for the sheltered water between the ocean and the city is enciphered as numbers, and the key is the landfall pressure of "the great storm that reshaped this city": 922 millibars.
Subtract 922 from each number and read the result as a position in the alphabet:
| Number | − 922 | Letter |
|---|---|---|
| 931 | 9 | I |
| 936 | 14 | N |
| 934 | 12 | L |
| 927 | 5 | E |
| 942 | 20 | T |
The storm is Hurricane Andrew, which made landfall south of Miami on 24 August 1992 with a central pressure of 922 millibars.
Meta letter: I
Clue Six · The Villa on the Bay
Answer: FOREVER
The Biscayne Observer article is a period pastiche about Vizcaya, James Deering's estate on Biscayne Bay. It contains seven typesetting errors. Correct each one and take the first letter of the corrected word, in the order the errors appear:
Frantiers → Frontiers · Origunal → Original · Remoddeled → Remodeled · Evning → Evening · Viwes → Views · Eelgance → Elegance · Rennovated → Renovated
The question is how long did he want it to last? Deering answers it himself in the article: nobody builds on the edge of eternity intending anything shorter. There was also a safety net. All seven misspelled words are capitalised mid-sentence, so anyone who trusted the capitals over their spelling instincts still found them.
Meta letter: F
Clue Seven · The Woman and the Railroad
Answer: LEGEND
This one is coordinate extraction. Each coordinate is line · word · letter:
| Coordinate | Word | Letter |
|---|---|---|
| 7 · 4 · 1 | land | L |
| 8 · 11 · 1 | estate | E |
| 9 · 2 · 5 | orange | G |
| 17 · 7 · 4 | have | E |
| 15 · 9 · 1 | name | N |
| 14 · 3 · 1 | died | D |
The story is Julia Tuttle's. After the freeze of 1894, she sent Henry Flagler orange blossoms from her land to prove the far south had survived it, and the railroad came south. The city was incorporated on 28 July 1896, and she is recognised as the only woman to have founded a major American city.
A correction from the Puzzle Master: line 16 says no monument marks what she accomplished. There is one. A statue of Julia Tuttle has stood in Bayfront Park since 28 July 2010, the city's 114th birthday. None of the coordinates touch that line.
Not accepted: LEGACY. It's a good word, but it's not the word the letters spell.
Meta letter: L
The Meta
M · I · A · M · I · F · L → MIAMI, FL
Accepted: MIAMI, FL · MIAMI FL · MIAMI, FLORIDA · any casing.
The state name was struck from every page, because its two letters (F and L) are the last two letters of the meta. A pack that printed "Florida" would have handed you a quarter of the answer.
Hard Mode
The pack's postscript promised a second road: one that passes through no clue, uses only what's already printed in the pack or worn on a garment, and delivers all eight answers at once.
It was real, and it's still there. Every finisher solved the seven clues. Nobody walked the second road.
We aren't publishing how it works. The boxes were never empty, and they still aren't. The second road is now this month's cipher: the September Letter says what walking it earns.
By the numbers
Thirty-three submissions. Twelve finished eight for eight, eight of them on their first attempt. The clue most often missed was Clue One: Miami Modern, Art Deco, and a street without its style, or a style without its street. Next came Clue Seven, where one solver wrote LEGACY four times before finding LEGEND. Every miss was a real answer to a slightly different question, which is exactly how a fair clue is supposed to fail.
— Salvador Satoshi, Puzzle Master Scrypt LLC