An artistic brush with the law

Last autumn, the tiny neighborhood behind Greta Engstrom's two-car garage gave way to suburban renewal and disappeared entirely. Developers who bought the land evicted the inhabitants and demolished their dilapidated homes. A steakhouse and an office building rose on the former site of the local candy store and barbershop.

Engstrom, whose property falls within the boundaries of the incorporated Village of Thomaston, in the Great Neck school and park districts, had lived in her Valley View Road house for 15 years when the neighborhood behind her garage disappeared. In all that time, and certainly since her husband died, she had never painted the back of her two-car garage, which faced the homes of the poor people and which, in the absence of those homes, was suddenly exposed to view from Northern Boulevard.

"Before they pushed these people out," Engstrom said, "I was the best house in the worst neighborhood. Now, suddenly, I'm the worst house in the best neighborhood. My property is on the borderline between Great Neck and Manhasset. Once, I looked at the map, and the borderline seemed to me to be drawn around the homes of white people and black people. I've always felt that if I were black, my house would be in Manhasset.

"Anyway, after they knocked down the neighborhood and exposed my garage, I felt obligated to do something. From the road, my garage looked like a slum. Also, I got angry whenever I looked out and saw what they did to these people's lives. I sat thinking and thinking to figure how I could fix up the garage and say something, too."

The unusually complicated thinking process Engstrom employed in answering the ordinarily ordinary question of how, exactly, to paint the backside of a garage stemmed from her age, background and education. She is 38, a child of the turbulent 1960s. She grew up in the Bronx, declined a college education, moved to Long Island and married a man five years her senior who owned a burglar alarm business. Engstrom assumed she would settle into a typical, suburban, family lifestyle, but her husband died of cancer five years ago, leaving her with an 8-year-old daughter and no guarantees for the future.

Engstrom entered the job market and soon learned that employers tended to shy away from widowed mothers of small children, partly because of natural inclination to choose, when their loyalties were tested, to tend to their children's needs before the employer's.

"I tried domestic work for a while," Engstrom said, "but I felt I wasn't going to go anywhere without an education. So, when I became eligible for Social Security, I decided to go to school, with the idea of getting a good job at the end of my studies. Well, I fell into the study of philosophy. I fell in love with it, with, for instance, Plato's dedication to education. I stuck with it and after five years, I graduated with honors, got the highest academic achievement in my class, and became just as eligible to tend bar or drive a cab as I was before."

Engstrom saw painting the garage as her first job as a philosopher. "We've lost a lot of our idealism," she said. "I really wanted to say something on the back of that garage. With the `Hands Across America' campaign and the coming celebration of Lady Liberty, I wanted to make the point that if we stick together as Americans, we can accomplish anything." Engstrom decided that she would paint a mural: red and white vertical stripes under white stars on a blue field, stars whose extended arms touched symbolically. In the center, she would show the face of the Statue of Liberty behind bars, a tear running down her cheek, and she would paint a message graffiti-style, over the stripes: "Save Liberty - Feed Americans."

"When I first started," Engstrom recalled, "my neighbors were so happy I was painting the garage they were smiling and greeting me all the time. Every day, they saw me painting and painting, and people started beeping the horn to say hello, until they saw the red and white stripes. Eventually they stopped and asked me what I was doing, and I got very favorable replies. The whole job took me 42 hours over six months.

"It was important to me that the stars touch `hands,' because that was the statement I wanted to make. I was originally going to do it freehand and just make them touch, but I had all my friends over, insisting that the angle of a true star's arms were something like 76 degrees and trying to figure out how to make perfect stars and still make them touch. They made protractors, and we went up and down the ladder again and again, making the arms higher, lower, higher, lower; and each time it came out wrong. They were so tied up in the mechanics, they couldn't understand the concept. These points had to touch.

"Finally, we threw down the protractors and went to freehand. They're not true stars now; the arms are lower. They're not all perfect; they're not exactly right. But it's the idea behind it. The Lady Liberty face I took off a Grand Union shopping bag and a friend helped me draw it. Everyone liked it until I put the graffiti on it. Neighbors at first hated it, and then came by and said, `Well, I guess I see what you mean,' but they couldn't undertand why I didn't paint the letters neatly. I said, `Well, then maybe you wouldn't have read it."

Recently, an inspector for the Village of Thomaston asked Engstrom to repaint the back of the garage, because, he said, residents had complained about it. "I told him, `You can't even see it from Thomaston,' " she said. ` "You have to stand in Manhasset to see it. If people in Manhasset have a problem with it, then let the officials from Manhasset complain about it.' "