MONDAY, MAY 19, 2025
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Dear New Yorkers,
About 25 years ago, people ing a drab industrial stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn started noticing a hand-painted billboard that looked both of the place and out of this world.
“Attention LANDLORDS,” it said, followed by an offer for home heating oil at cheap prices.
The words were a snooze, but the billboard’s image was a wow. It featured a hot-pink brontosaurus with a long neck and a face that looked part amphibian, part simian and mostly saucy young woman. It was lettered with a name: SHERITA.
By the early aughts, local hipsters were oohing and ahhing over Sherita. But who had put Sherita in northern Brooklyn — and why?
Suddenly, in 2024, she was gone, painted over in just a few hours. It was as though a dowager Brooklyn diva had died.
What fans don’t know is that Sherita was never about quirky old working-class Brooklyn.
Instead she marks a nasty pattern of northern Brooklyn real estate manipulation. The key scams happened in buildings like Sherita’s: where a seemingly friendly man with a heating oil company rented an empty store — and wound up taking the whole building from its stunned owners.
Read more here about the terrible truth about Sherita, Brooklyn’s beloved billboard dinosaur.
Friends that SCOOP together, stay together — forward your pal this email!
Weather ☀️
Low 70s and sunny. Woohoo!
MTA 🚇
There’s no 2 train between Chambers Street in Manhattan and Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center in Brooklyn overnight through Wednesday. Find all the MTA’s planned changes and the latest delays here.
Alternate side parking 🚙
It’s in effect today, May 19.
By the way…
It’s Chinatown Restaurant Week! And they’re running a raffle, so the more restaurants you visit the higher chance you have of winning a free meal.
Our Other Top Stories
- Here’s how the head of a Super PAC tried — and failed — to remove every opponent of Council candidate Wil López from the ballot.
- Four reporters blocked from entering Brooklyn College campus during a pro-Palestinian student demonstration on May 8 plan to sue. Their lawyer argues that Brooklyn College owes reporters their first amendment rights to freedom of the press.
- Two of West Harlem’s Community Board 9 — the chairs of the land use committee — were booted from their positions by borough president Mark Levine due to their negative on housing developments — and it’s not the first time.
- A mailer sent out this month to voters ahead of the primary election rails for a “sensible majority” to “beat back special interests pushing our politics toward extremes.” But it doesn’t say to vote for or against any candidate — meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its funders, which seem to be linked to a company whose CEO is advising the Cuomo campaign.
Reporter’s Notebook
Cuomo’s ‘Roll Back’ on Pension Reform
Mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo said he would “roll back” the controversial Tier 6 pension reform he championed as governor and work to reduce the retirement age for public school teachers to 55. He made the remarks in response to questions from United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew at the union’s mayoral forum on Saturday.
Cuomo initially dismissed Tier 6 as “ancient history” that was ed by state lawmakers in 2012 at a time of fiscal crisis. In reality, the then-governor was a key architect of the pension reform that slashed benefits and raised the retirement age to 63 for new hires.
“We can afford to roll back Tier 6 now. The state has the funding,” he said Saturday. “We have to attract the best teachers to our New York City schools.”
He was followed onstage by Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who introduced himself as a Tier 6 employee. “It was exciting to see the man who created it, in-person,” he said of Cuomo.
— Claudia Irizarry Aponte
Things To Do
Here are some free and low-cost things to do around the city this week.
- Monday, May 19: Want to learn how to play pétanque, a bocce-esque outdoor bowling game? Learn how at Washington Square Park, 12 p.m.
- Monday, May 19: Listen to the American Symphony Orchestra perform Cuban dance music from the late 1800s. Bryant Park, 5:30.
- Tuesday, May 20: See a screening of the documentary The Holocaust, 80 Years On, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, 7:30 p.m.
THE KICKER: A new tactic for trying to keep Bodega workers safe: role-play deescalation trainings.
Thanks, as always, for reading. Make it a great Monday.
Love,
THE CITY
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