Passage
For years the blank brick wall beside the corner grocery faced the street, gray and empty. Last summer a group of neighbors decided to cover it with a mural. The project’s lead artist1 a painter who grew up on the block sketched the first design on a sheet of butcher paper. The 2 neighbors donations paid for the paint and the ladders. Before the work began, the wall 3 has stood blank for nearly a decade.
Painting a wall this large takes weeks. A crew maps the design onto the bricks, mixes the colors, and 4 is blocking in the large shapes before the fine work starts. The row of tall ladders 5 lean against the scaffold at the end of each day. The scaffold is 6 tall, a spotter stands at its base whenever someone climbs. The wall’s rough texture makes every brushstroke drag7 so the painters work slowly and with care.
The mural is not a single picture but a series of panels. Each panel tells 8 their own small story about the neighborhood: a market stall, a school bus, a garden plot. Together the panels form one long scene that stretches the whole length of the wall.
Part of what draws people to the project is the chance to make something in public. Neighbors who had never met stop to watch and, now and then, to pick up a brush. The design the crew chose is quite different 9 than the plain signs that once covered the wall. Standing across the street, 10 the whole scene can be taken in at once.
The first week was slow going, but the mural soon drew glances from every passing bus. 11 As a result, more volunteers arrived to help. By the third week the colors had begun to glow against the brick, and the faint pencil lines the crew had drawn disappeared under the paint. 12 The mural now 13 has the bright, crowded life of the street rather than a dull gray wall.
The finished mural was unveiled at a block party in the fall. Children pointed to the panels they had helped paint, and older residents traced the scenes from the neighborhood’s past. 14 What had been a blank gray wall was now a picture the whole street could claim as its own. 15
