Graffiti vandals tagged a Brooklyn brownstone next door to Spike Lee’s father’s home Thursday — just days after the hipster-hating director went on an anti-gentrification rant.
Residents who live next door to Lee’s dad’s place at 165 Washington Park in Fort Greene woke to find someone had spray-painted “Do The Right Thing” across the façade of their home after Lee railed that newcomers to the area were guilty of “Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” picked on his father and had turned the ’hood and its parks into “the Westminster dog show.”
“It’s horrible, it’s mindless,” said retired computer programmer Dianne MacKenzie, 66, whose Washington Park home was spray-painted with the words “Do The Right Thing” in the middle of the night.
MacKenzie — who is friendly with Lee’s dad Bill and stepmother and has lived next door to their home in Fort Greene since 1998 — is fuming that the director gave out his father’s address during a Tuesday night tirade in which he claimed an influx of white newcomers ruined the area.
MacKenzie thinks the vandals, who also smashed her windows, meant the message — a nod to Lee’s 1989 film — as a defense of Lee’s jazz musician father. But she’s not one of the neighbors who complained about the music, she insisted.
“All I know is Spike Lee made these comments and the next day my door is broken and I’m vandalized,” she said.
The director ignited a firestorm after his comments at a Black History Month event at the Pratt Institute.
“You can’t discover this! We been here,” Lee bellowed.
“You just can’t come in and bogart. There were brothers playing motherf—in’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in ninetee-motherf—in’ sixty-eight, and the motherf—in’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father,” Lee said.
“He doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic. We bought the mother—in house in nineteen-sixty-motherf—in-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the f—k outta here!” the mogul said.
“You have to come with respect,” Lee said. “There’s a code.”