Homeowner Responds to Graffiti by Adding Her Message to Wall

When vandals spray-painted graffiti on her back-yard wall, Sheila Rogers Engelberg was incensed.

“I was angry,” she said. “I was saddened. I said, ‘There goes the neighborhood. What chutzpah, what nerve.’ We have been living here 37 years and never had graffiti. Suddenly, up and down the alley there’s graffiti.”

But as her anger subsided, Engelberg decided that sandblasting or whitewashing were not the answer. “I thought if I could do something that is pretty and has a message, maybe that will do some good,” she said.

So Engelberg, an actress who lives on Fulton Avenue in Van Nuys, hired artist Peggy Pfening to paint a scroll with the words: “If we cannot contribute to the beauty in life, let us not add to the ugliness.”

At Engelberg’s direction, Pfening, who usually paints advertisements on store windows, added a butterfly, a rainbow and flowers.

“The whole purpose of this was to make it warm and gentle and not intimidating,” Engelberg said. She deliberately had Pfening paint the mural next to, and not over, the vandal’s markings. “I left the graffiti there so the message would come across,” she said.

Her husband, Monroe Engelberg, was not encouraging at first. “He said it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” she said.

But her husband is now one of the mural’s biggest fans, she said. And since the mural went up two weeks ago, she said, a neighbor down the alley has hired Pfening to paint another mural. Another neighbor wants one on her garage door, Engelberg said.

And has there been any new graffiti?

“Not on my wall,” she said.