Spike Lee grew up in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. His parents still live there. He still keeps an office there. But it's not the same neighborhood he grew up in, and his feelings about newcomers now inhabiting once-blighted parts of America's most-populous city like Fort Greene slapped many people in the face after the famed director went into an expletive-laced rant during an African-American History Month lecture on Tuesday. "I grew up here in New York. It's changed," Lee said at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, an art, design, and architecture school. "And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn't picked up every mother******* day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. ... The police weren't around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o'clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something."
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Filmmaker Spike Lee rips into questioner during speech
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Lee riled about New York gentrification and hipsters
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Urban policy professor asks: Does Lee want New York to be Detroit?
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D.K. Smith, the questioner, says "What I wanted to do was expand the dialogue"
Of course, that means some people are going to have to find other places to live, but that's the magic of @placeholder.