Alice Is Coming to ‘The Wall’

Say "so long" to the the dirty gray walls outside the Washington Market Park’s tennis and basketball courts on Chambers Street. Alice is bringing a fanciful wonderland of local color to the popular Stuyvesant hangout. Students from the school, led by artist Natalia Zukerman and interns from CityArts, the sponsoring organization that raised $60,000 for the project, are painting a wild assemblage of images that feature the Lewis Carroll figure: Alice meets early Manhattan settlers; Alice flies a kite on Wall Street; Alice takes the subway, etc. First proposed by students Christina Ward and Elizabeth Lohr as a literal depiction of the Alice story, the setting switched to New York. Last month, Zukerman took the kids’ whimsical ideas and created a seamless flow of scenes. Some are still evolving. It’s an ambitious undertaking not likely to be completed by school’s end.

The mural now has the blessing of the Parks Department and Washington Market Park Board of Directors, but some tennis players are leery, saying that the mural will give students even more sense of territorial claim to an area that the kids are not always happy to share. Students, however, call the mural a positive step. "It was just a grey cracked wall. Now people will stop and look at it," said Alex Barash. "It will be like a mini-landmark in Tribeca."

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