I’ve discovered another painted ad for US Rep. Paul Fino, which is in rather better shape than the previous one I found in Morris Park a few years ago, on Crotona Avenue and East 183rd Street in Belmont.
Fino (1913-2009) was elected to the State Senate from 1946-1950 and elected to Congress in 1952, where he served 8 terms, and then the State Supreme Court in 1968.
A usually conservative though sometimes moderate Republican, Mr. Fino had a hard time swallowing what he considered the Manhattan-style elitism of [John V.] Lindsay, who was mayor from 1966 through 1973. His needling of the mayor resonated with the [then] mostly Italian and Irish working-class homeowners in what was then the 25th Congressional District in the Bronx. He represented them from 1953 to 1968.
In 1967, when he was also the chairman of the Bronx Republican Party, Mr. Fino called for all Republicans to oppose Mayor Lindsay, a fellow Republican, and his campaign to promote New York as “Fun City.”
On May 18, 1967, Mr. Fino stood on a ladder to finish affixing a 20-by-8-foot billboard beside the Willis Avenue Bridge, which connects Manhattan and the Bronx. The sign read: “Fun City Line Stops Here” and “Republicans of Bronx County Want No Fun Riots, Fun Taxes, Fun Crimes, Fun Mayor.”…
…At the peak of his feud with Mayor Lindsay, Mr. Fino proposed a new verse for the song “East Side, West Side.” His version went:
“East Side, West Side, all around the town,/Taxes are going up and Lindsay’s going down.”
…In 1972, he sentenced a 23-year-old drug addict convicted of selling one-seventy-third of an ounce of heroin to 30 years in prison. NY Times
2/20/17