Panamanians in New York have a long tradition of community organizing. Each week, there are community galas, harbor cruises, karaoke nights, and parades, all of which end in the same place where they were planned: Michelle’s Cocktail Lounge. The bar at 2294 Bedford Avenue, on the corner of a residential block in Flatbush, has been “the Office” for New York Panamanians for fifty years.
But for a three-month stretch over the summer, Michelle’s was closed: Sherwin Johnson, Jr. was renovating before passing the bar down to his son, Sherwin Johnson, III. Of his son, he says, “He’s the boss now.”
Michelle’s reopened last October, but that break exposed a sharp demand. During the closure, every Saturday, regulars transformed the sidewalk in front of the marbled black facade into a tropical noir vignette. Dancehall, salsa, and soca music played from a Bluetooth speaker. Ladies in evening gowns stepped out of a cab into the glow of a streetlight. Folks streamed in and out of Michelle’s Fritura — the next-door, Saturday-only takeout stall — with treats like fried yuca and chicharrones. Men sat under the fluttering street trees, playing dominoes while gently bouncing plates of carimañolas on their legs to the music.
Michelle’s is the last concentrated meeting spot in what was once a thriving ecosystem of businesses supporting the largest diasporic Panamanian community in the world.
Sherwin Johnson III in front of Michelle’s. Cole Saladino
Managers Kim Creedland and Derick Mayer. Cole Saladino
Afro-Panamanian families migrated to Panama from the West Indies at the turn of the twentieth century to work on the canal. They came to Brooklyn en masse, sometimes just one generation later, to escape stifling race-based pay scales, limited public services in majority-Black cities like Colón, and finally denaturalization. Already accustomed to building their own grassroots civic institutions, they integrated swiftly into Brooklyn’s existing Black and West Indian community. Keysha Corinealdi, a Rutgers professor and author of Panama in Black, says, “There was this sense of: ‘If something is missing, I am going to fix it.’” Panamanian-led organizations proliferated.
Junior’s father, the late Sherwin Johnson, Sr., arrived in Brooklyn in 1960. At the time, all down Franklin Avenue, blue-and-white flags fluttered over a dozen Panamanian bars. In 1972, he bought an old Italian American social club and renamed it Michelle’s, after Junior’s firstborn.
Panamanians weren’t attracted to the place at first. Sherwin Sr. had preserved the slot machines and Sinatra music from the bar’s previous owners, but in October 1982, Junior was inspired to get involved. Standing outside at dawn before the Panamanian Day Parade, he heard coronets and drums in the distance. Panamanian marching bands were playing dianas – festive numbers that police and fire department bands serenade the mayor with on the dawns of festivals in Colón. Junior said, “I hadn’t heard that since I was a boy, and it made me cry.”
Junior got rid of the slot machines, started playing Latin and West Indian music, and served jerk chicken on Tuesday nights, free of charge. “I supported whatever [Brooklyn Panamanians] were doing, and they’ve supported me ever since.”
On one Saturday evening during the closure, customers shared memories. A regular Michelle’s DJ, James Smith (aka Famoso DJ Coochie), remembered a man who arrived from Panama via JFK with a suitcase. “He was here all night. Finally, we tracked down his friend’s uncle, and he came from the Bronx at 2 a.m. to pick him up. I saw that guy years later; he had a job at a hospital.” Augusto George recalled his own arrival: “My cousin’s husband brought me to the Office. When you don’t know anybody in this country, you come here and you’re home.”
Inside Michelle’s Lounge. Cole Saladino
When Junior suspected his decades of providing meals, housing, and funds had helped him maintain a crew of regulars, he was right. At a recent gala, Lisa Charley, president of Sociedad y Hermandad Internacional del Chorrillo, a Brooklyn-based charity organization, thanked over twenty Panamanian community organizations and named Junior personally.
Today, there are around 30,000 Panamanians in NYC, most of them in Brooklyn, though the diaspora has spread to Orlando, Houston, and Los Angeles. Veronica Parker, the last owner of a popular restaurant, Kelso, which closed in 2017, told Remezcla. “We’re being pushed out,” referring to gentrification’s effects on Caribbean businesses. Still, Sherwin III has a large and loyal customer base.
The bar reopened on October 11, 2025, the day of Brooklyn’s 30th Panamanian Day Parade on Franklin Avenue. It rained all morning. Drummers in Panama hats and smocks took cover under scaffolding. When the sun peeked through in the late afternoon, they emerged and led the parade. One spun his drum high above the crowd between beats. Behind them, a troupe in airbrushed safari outfits followed a man holding a stuffed lizard and blowing a whistle. Bringing up the end, Famoso DJ Coochie blared soca from a rolling wall of speakers.
After sundown, paraders trudged through puddles toward the corner of Albemarle and Bedford. A Panamanian flag hung inside above the entrance; a long white granite bar, underlit by purple neon lights reflected off the mirrored wall. In the back room, where for decades, customers have sung karaoke, paraders sang under a yellow, white, and blue Colón flag.
A week after the parade, long-time patrons watched TV at the bar, with the quiet calm of a family after a big holiday meal. Sherwin III emerged from the basement with photo albums and passed them around. Two elderly Black men flipped through the pages. One stopped on a photo of two much younger men in white. He leaned in and pointed at the photo.
They lingered like that for a long time. Then, at a high-top table by the front door, they were distracted by a pair of women singing the chorus to a salsa urbana song. The man closed the album and looked toward the door as it opened. New people were arriving.
The main room at Michelle’s Lounge. Cole Saladino