Peter Sagal author page
1 puzzle by Peter Sagal
with Jeff Chen comments
See the 3 answer words debuted by Peter Sagal.
| I | S | L | A | S | P | I | T | C | H | E | E | R | ||
| S | T | A | G | E | N | A | M | E | H | Y | D | R | A | |
| U | R | S | A | M | I | N | O | R | I | M | G | A | Y | |
| P | I | E | O | P | I | U | M | S | N | E | S | S | ||
| P | R | O | J | E | C | T | A | A | A | |||||
| B | I | D | S | E | N | G | L | I | S | H | ||||
| K | N | E | E | A | V | E | R | M | O | O | ||||
| N | E | W | Y | O | R | K | M | A | R | A | T | H | O | N |
| O | R | E | P | A | P | A | A | O | N | E | ||||
| B | O | R | O | U | G | H | R | A | E | S | ||||
| U | S | E | D | O | D | G | E | R | S | |||||
| O | W | N | S | S | T | O | C | K | Y | A | L | F | ||
| L | O | O | T | S | W | I | K | I | P | E | D | I | A | |
| A | R | I | E | L | I | D | O | N | T | M | I | N | D | |
| F | E | R | R | Y | T | O | N | S | T | O | G | S |
Fun use of the NEW YORK MARATHON's course in this puzzle. It starts in Staten Island (Step 1), goes through Brooklyn (Step 2), etc., and each step along the way helps the puzzle to completion. The FERRY isn't the passenger ship since 1817 — it's the (Staten Island) FERRY. The old baseball team is not just the DODGERS, but the (Brooklyn) DODGERS.
My favorites were the ones where the clue/answer made zero sense until you got the gimmick. How could a show of contempt be a CHEER? Ah, when it's a Bronx CHEER!
Some didn't work as well — I didn't even realize that Queens was part of (Queens) ENGLISH, as this low-brow Yank thinks of any ENGLISH accent as upper-class.
We've added the implied BOROUGHs below in case you're still confused.
So fortuitous that the themers worked out to be symmetrical. There's not a lot of options for "Manhattan ___" or "Bronx ___," so Peter and Mike must have held their breath, hoping that the crossword gods would shine down on them. The puzzle might have worked okay with asymmetrical lengths, but it's so much more elegant to obey the rules of crossword symmetry.
Solid construction. Although the themers are mostly short, seven of them is wicked hard, especially when you're working with a central 15-letter entry. At first, I wondered why they left the NW and SE so wide open — a bit of ISLA / ISUP / AGA glue is almost always necessary to hold a big section like this together. Why not break them up a bit?
Ah. Mike and Peter had to deploy so many of their black squares in the middle of the grid that they ran out in the NW / SE. 15x15 crosswords can't go above 78 words, so if you break up a whole lot of entries into short words in the middle, you necessarily end up with some long ones around the perimeter.
Fun concept, made me want to get back out and train!