Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York looks at the changes in the meat packing district.

Welcome back to another edition of Where & When.  The holidays are neigh and I will probably only post once this week so that we can all do our own thing on the day and recover afterwards, but if I do post another, I’m certain it won’t be Thursday.  I do apologize for the inconsistency of late, but my work schedule has been similarly inconsistent.  This week should provide me a bit of relief; especially with what I hear will be a major snowstorm coming to the NY Tri-State area as early as Wednesday.

That said, let us debate over this latest picture:

I had a little bit of trouble pinpointing the location, even with the given clues, so this may or may not take a while depending on your resources.  I am particularly curious about a couple of the clues in this photo, so anything you can add to the description in terms of the businesses pictured would certainly be worthy of a bonus.  As far as when is concerned, I’m certain we can gather what season it is, but for the year I’m looking for the same year as a particular exposition in this region involving horses and drinking. Did somebody say fun? I sure hope they capped it at a certain point if it was…

A raft of River City for the first with the answers to both where and when, and Napitki iz Chernogolovki for comrades who follow with correct answers. Leave your answers in the thread and discuss freely. Links are your friend, and so are well researched responses.  No peeking at the photo credit, of course.  And again, anyone who wishes to submit a future challenge can submit the picture and corresponding info to me via email.  Poka!

[Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons]

There is a massive new biography out on Barbara Stanwyck. And it’s only Volume One. Still, it looks appealing.

For the Brain McCann signing. Here’s the word from:

Fangraphs.

ESPN.

The New York Post. 

It’s About The Money, Stupid. 

River Ave. Blues. 

Over at Cinephilia and Beyond check out Peter Sellers’ imitation of Michael Caine.

Okay, since we’ve got McCann on the brain here’s Les (with Eddie Harris):

[Image Via: Luchi Capurro]

The Yanks agreed to a 5-year deal with free agent catcher Brian McCann today. A physical is pending.

McCann has pop and is an upgrade if an expensive one. And, as Jon Taylor writes at SI.com, he was worked hard behind the plate in Atlanta.

At least we know he’s got a good game face.

Hey, if he’s on the team, wearing the pinstripes, I’m happy to root for him. Just remind me what was wrong with Russell Martin again?

[Photo Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images]

He wouldn’t do me wrong.

[Painting by Winslow Homer]

TV Theme Song of the Week:

Okay, we need a better title but thought it’d be fun to highlight a catchy TV theme song each week round here.

Lil’ help with a title?

Welcome Back to Where & When.  This will be a special edition to highlight the recent loss of a cultural icon.  For several generations and cultures who inhabit the city, this was their Penn Station. I present this without further comment, but feel free to post thoughts.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013:

 Here is a Google Gallery of what was 5 Pointz. 

Here is a little history.

Michael Weiner, the executive director of the MLBPA, passed away yesterday at 51. Over at ESPN, Jerry Crasnick salutes a voice of reason.

Furious Cool is the title of a new book about the great Richard Pryor by Joe Henry and David Henry. Here’s a Q&A with the author’s over at the Atlantic. And a review of the book at the A.V. Club.

Tomorrow night at 7 out in Queens gives one of the great movies of them all. Even if you have a big HD TV you should treat yourself and see this on the big screen.

Do the Yanks dare to let Robbie Cano go? No, they don’t. They’ll sign him. But Tyler Kepner thinks it is a decent idea:

Losing a superstar is not always as devastating as people fear at the time. Two winters ago, the St. Louis Cardinals watched Albert Pujols leave for a 10-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Angels. They responded by signing Carlos Beltran for two years, giving contract extensions to Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, and using their compensatory draft pick on Michael Wacha. Discipline sometimes works.

The Yankees are willing to give Cano $23 million or so for each of the next seven years, a $161 million package that is already too generous. That kind of deal has put the Yankees in their present state — decaying and injury-prone — and the team needs to break the cycle.

An influx of fresh talent from the farm system is the best way to start. The Yankees do not have those players, but that should not make them desperate. Desperate teams make the costliest mistakes.

[Image Via: Rob Tringali]

Wow. 

More mishegoss at the Rodriguez hearing. 

Ry Cooder has a new live record out. Alec Wilkinson has a thoughtful post about Cooder and performing live over at the New Yorker:

Absent disabling cases of stage fright, emotional reversals, or predatory addictions, performers who withdraw from performing—who liberate themselves straight into a private life—are rare. One of the few popular musicians I can think of who has done so happily (besides George Harrison) is Ry Cooder. Perhaps in Cooder’s case it isn’t surprising since he began his career as a studio musician, when he was still a teen-ager—he grew up, that is, in a context where music was made in rooms with only a few people present, not on a stage for an audience. He once said that the people who want the applause should have it, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t like being watched. He didn’t like the pressure of having to deliver a performance—as opposed to just playing music—and he didn’t like being analyzed by the guitarists who stood as close as they could to try and figure out what he was doing. The whole experience was draining. After a concert, he once said, he felt like a withered balloon under a chair at the end of a children’s party. About thirty years ago, he reached a point where he could no longer go out on stage and say one more time, “Ladies and gentlemen, and especially you ladies…”

…Another reason Cooder didn’t tour is that in middle age he felt he could no longer perform many of the songs he had recorded when he was younger. Some of them had relied on a jauntiness he no longer felt.

So this went viral yesterday.

Go here, click around the stations where everyone is singing “Like a Rolling Stone.” 

James Hughes has a fun piece over on Elliott Gould over at Grantland:

Despite being a Dodgers fan, Gould was pulling for the Pirates in the playoffs. “I’m into wishful thinking,” he said. “But the abstraction of rooting for a team, and personalizing it, affects me emotionally, and I don’t want to be affected emotionally by what other people do. Life is not about winning and losing. Even when people talk about luck, there’s a deep part of me that doesn’t believe in it. I believe in timing.”

My conversations with Gould inevitably circle back to sports, reinforcing his resemblance to his character in Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming — the father figure who always seems to call at the right time to “discuss the Knicks-Bulls exhibition game” at dizzying length. On October 9, the day after Andy Pafko died, I called Gould for his reaction. “Pafko had the biggest forearms I ever saw. He came up to the Catskill Mountains when I was staying there and hit a softball over the biggest tree in center field. It was breathtaking.” He recounted how thrilling it was when the Cubs traded Pafko to the Dodgers in 1951, and rattled off the other players acquired in the deal: Johnny Schmitz, Wayne Terwilliger, and Rube Walker. “I’d have to look at the roster and tell you who I remember, because I don’t lie. It’s too easy, being inventive and creative, to spin things.”6 He scrambled around for a baseball almanac to verify his claim, but laughed when the only book at arm’s length was The Complete Conversations With God.

Gould so often couches his reminiscences with allusions to sports and sense memories from childhood that his response to whether he had any allegiances to the Brooklyn Nets came as no surprise. “No, none whatsoever,” he said, bluntly. Had the franchise started from scratch and not been a New Jersey transplant,7 would he feel the same way? “What comes to mind is Jell-O,” he continued. “Then I was thinking more in terms of My-T-Fine chocolate pudding, which my mother used to make. She would pour it into little cups and let me clean the pot. That’s Brooklyn to me, that’s home. The Nets? That’s not Brooklyn to me.”