RIP Sherita, we hardly knew you

By Hannah Frishberg

Along Brooklyn’s endless Atlantic Avenue, there is a notably drab, faded stretch on the border of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, a purgatorial no man’s land of auto shops, industrial businesses, six lanes of traffic and, until this Sunday, Sherita.

Part of an old billboard for a long gone company advertising fuel oil to landlords, it remains up for debate what Sherita’s creator was going for with her — dinosaur? Flamingo? Dr. Seuss character? — but what they accidentally created was an icon.

In a town where change is constant — businesses, homes and certainly art installations are built only to be gone within the year, the month, the week, the day — Sherita endured decades (since at least 1983, one former area resident confirmed) from her second-story perch, hand-painted eyes coyly smiling, weird trident ponytail forever reaching towards heaven, her name displayed for all to see on an ill-fitting gold band around her willowy neck.

For so long, she was there, an oddly sexy retro delight between neighborhoods, her unique physique and stalwart existence inspiring band names, drag performances, tattoos, t-shirts, poems, lots of art and plenty of attempts (all failed) at uncovering her origin story.

And then, after all those years as a reliable guidepost, weathered but unmoved, this past weekend she was taken without warning, painted over in an opaque coat of white before her legions of fans had a chance to say goodbye.

Why are so many truly precious gems snatched from us before their time, yet certain sultry fuel oil mascots are granted almost eternal life in New York City, long past the point anyone can even be contacted to explain who they are?

I rang 10 different numbers associated with the landlord and the building’s old Home Heating Oil company (most were disconnected), five nearby businesses, the Brooklyn Borough Historian and an adjacent church which predates Sherita – no one had a clue how this smirking pink giraffe(?) came to be.

That her bell finally tolled should not have been surprising, and yet it triggered an outpouring of mourning on social media. Many, it seems, were inspired by the ability of something so random to last so long.

“I used to ride the B48 bus past this corner, almost every day, coming from my studio in Williamsburg to my home in Crown Heights,” says artist Scott Dolan. “That was of course in the days before cell phones and Google Maps, and things like that, and I would watch for landmarks as I made my way home, Sherita being one of my favorites. The pink fuel oil dinosaur with the Pebbles-like top knot that may or may not refer to an oil geyser! I get that! But then: why is she so pretty? And how did she come to be named ‘Sherita’!? This was a mystery to me, and I wanted to know more. I always imagined that someday we’d meet IRL, but so far, no luck.”

Too strange to live, too weird to die, Sherita was born to be an ethereal blip of a billboard, a bizarrely drawn capitalist shill in blue eye-shadow, but she beat the odds and instead stood as a rare, unwavering constant on the corner of Classon as Brooklyn metamorphosed around her, until she’d outlived the very thing she was born to sell, becoming instead a beacon of meaninglessness, flat fixed in place, defying the rat race by doing and selling nothing at all. (Related and not forgotten: There are many of us who still mourn the disappearance of the Kentile Floors sign that once hovered as a lodestar over the Gowanus Canal.)

“I think to me she was a symbol for all of the idiosyncrasies that make NYC such an endlessly fascinating and entertaining and beautiful place to live,” says Abi Inman, who was one of the first to document the disappearance of Sherita. “Part of living here is knowing that the tidal pull of homogeneity, or even just change, is always coming for the things you love. But the city keeps sprouting newer and weirder limbs all the time, thank god. This Sherita has disappeared, but somewhere in the city a new Sherita rises.”

Sherita in 2023. (Photo by Lara Hudson)

I remember when the CubeSmart across Sherita’s way was the hulking remains of the old Packard Automobile Showroom, its structural beams poking through the naked brick and mortar visible where its cornice once was. It was spooky and Detroit-y yet still grand, a ghost of its opulent former self.

Sherita was never opulent, grand, or a version of her former self. She was always just the same inexplicable illustration on the same street corner, inexcusably, unendingly, impossibly herself.

Now Sherita has shuffled off this mortal coil – ascended to the great billboard in the sky, where fuel oil is free to all – but she lives on in those who knew her: She will always be a part of our personal New York skyline, that sundry assemblage of memories which compose each of our own mental metropolises, subconscious cities removed from time, where billboards cannot be buffed, only built upon using the endless air rights of the soul.

Goodbye, Sherita. You will be missed.

‘Yesterday, as mysteriously as she came into our lives, she left them, slipping out in a tide of whitewash. Nothing gold can stay. I’ll miss you Sherita,’ Inman wrote on Instagram (Courtesy Abi Inman)