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Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times

 

ART UNDER ATTACK A four-story mural at 104th Street and Lexington Avenue from the 1970s features real-life residents. This month, graffiti vandals struck.

 

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By DAVID GONZALEZ

 

 

The walls of East Harlem can speak. Dozens of colorful murals line the narrow streets and wide avenues, celebrating pleneros and poets, rumberos and revolutionaries. Defying gentrification, their dazzling colors brighten sun-starved stretches and declare that the neighborhood’s residents refuse to budge.

 

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“We have a special flavor in our community because of our murals,” said Carmen Vasquez, a longtime resident. “Our history and culture is there. They’re a way of saying who we are and where we’re going. Everything has a meaning.”

 

Lamentably so. Ms. Vasquez was dressed in black, the reason for her mourning evident behind her — huge bubble letters, recklessly slathered across the “The Spirit of East Harlem,” a four-story landmark by Hank Prussing that has graced the southeast corner of East 104th Street and Lexington Avenue since 1978.

 

The vandalism happened about two weeks ago, said Ms. Vasquez, the deputy executive director of Hope Community, a neighborhood housing and social services group that commissioned the mural. People have always respected the towering piece, which is a collage of real people from the neighborhood depicted playing music or dominoes, or relaxing on stoops.

 

“How could anyone feel they could come in and destroy this?” she said. “We have built this up over so many years. It took us so long to get here.”

 

The mural’s celebration of everyday life and real people makes it a singular work, said Jane Weissman, a muralist and an author of “On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City.”

 

“Until then, murals in New York had historical figures, if they had any recognizable figures at all,” she said. “This was the first time that a mural about a neighborhood, because it’s a celebration of a neighborhood, had people who were from there. Everybody in that mural was recognizable.”

 

Mr. Prussing photographed local characters before he started painting. Originally, the piece was going to cover only the upper part of the apartment building, but a grant let him expand it. The upper parts of the mural feature people — and famous logos for New York cultural touchstones like The Daily News and the salsa band Conjunto Libre, among others — and the lower part is an abstract mix of color, lines and letters.

 

“The whole concept was to make it interactive,” said Mr. Prussing. “I anticipated there would be graffiti which people would add in keeping with the collagelike look. But not much ever happened because people respected it.”

 

Not that others hadn’t tried some stunts over the years. “There was a woman I painted who didn’t like it because her friends said she looked fat,” he recalled. “She got somebody to go up with a ladder and paint her face out. She didn’t want to hurt it too much, so she used flesh-colored paint. We figured out who did it pretty quickly.”

 

Local activists have asked politicians and city officials for donations of paint and funds to restore the work as quickly as possible. They also hope to hold a community forum to educate young people on the importance of respecting the area’s many murals, which they say is the only guarantee of protection for public art.

 

The vandals who tagged the mural have not been found, so no one knows why they dared deface it. But other muralists said that these acts tend to happen when young graffiti writers want to become infamous as quickly as possible. Murals by more traditional brush-wielding artists may be more vulnerable than works by graffiti artists, said Hector Nazario, who paints under the name Nicer with Tats Cru, a Bronx-based group that paints murals around the city. He said his graffiti murals were usually immune to defacing because vandals knew they might run into him. The letters may be big, but the circle is small. Word travels fast.

 

“Remember that scene in ‘Get Shorty’ where John Travolta is waiting in the living room with the TV on?” he said. “The last thing this kid wants is to get home and see us there having coffee with his mother when our intention is to yoke them up. That’s the scenario, us waiting for you, like ‘Get Shorty.’ ”

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