It’s been more than 70 years since Paul A. Fino began serving as a U.S. Congressional rep for the Bronx, where he was born and raised.
Fino, a leader in the Bronx’s Republican party, won a seat in the 83rd Congress in 1952, then was reelected for seven more terms—resigning in 1968 to become a judge on the New York State Supreme Court.
He sounds like the kind of colorful, promotional politician who understood his constituents in the borough’s 25th District. In postwar New York City, that district—from Riverdale to Woodlawn to Parkchester to Throgs Neck—was primarily Italian, Irish, German, and Jewish, per a New York Times article on Fino’s battle to keep his Congressional seat in 1956.
It’s hard to know where he would land in today’s political climate. Fino, who earned a law degree in 1937, was described in one article as a “pragmatic moderate.” He was opposed to busing and abortion rights, but he voted for the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. He supported Medicare, as well as “bigger and earlier” Social Security benefits.
His battles with liberal Mayor John Lindsay were legendary. “Mr. Fino had a hard time swallowing what he considered the Manhattan-style elitism of Mr. Lindsay, who was mayor from 1966 through 1973,” the New York Times stated in Fino’s obituary.
Fino retreated from political life after the 1970s; he died in 2009 at age 95. I wonder what this long-serving politician would think if he knew that a re-election ad painted on the side of a tenement in the 1950s or 1960s would still be legible in 2024?
The faded sign, at Crotona Avenue and 183rd Street, preserves him as “your fighting congressman” on a tenement located roughly between two Bronx landmarks: Arthur Avenue and the Bronx Zoo.
[Shoutout to Justine V. for spotting this ad and taking the photo. Second photo: New York Times]
Ephemeral New York 