By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
TRIBECA — The "Alice in Wonderland"-inspired mural on Chambers Street has seen better days.
Alice has a graffiti mustache, the Statue of Liberty is missing her torch and someone scrawled "BAN NYC HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGES" over a depiction of a stagecoach.
On Thursday, a group of volunteers armed with paintbrushes set out to repair the beloved TriBeCa mural, which Stuyvesant High School students created in 2002.
"It's become an icon in the community," said Amy Appleton, project coordinator for CITYarts, the nonprofit group that sponsored the original mural. "When people see it, they have a relationship to it. It's important that it stays visible and doesn't turn into a concrete slab again."
The 70-foot mural between Greenwich and West streets shows Alice gallivanting around New York City, squeezing into the subway and relaxing in the shadow of skyscrapers. It also shows some of her companions from the Lewis Carroll novel, including the Cheshire cat and the Queen of Hearts.
The Stuyvesant students thought up the theme for the mural before 9/11, and afterward they considered changing it to something more somber, but in the end they kept it as it was.
"They decided to stick to it as a way to show that the wonder of New York City was still there," Appleton said. "It's really about their life in New York and their pride [in the] city."
The mural has suffered much wear and tear over the years, and nearly all of it is chipping. CITYarts began to restore it last summer, but the icy weather and large snowdrifts this winter left even the repainted sections in bad shape, Appleton said.
The restoration process began again on Thursday, as volunteers from the Warehouse Agency, a Financial District advertising firm, took a day off from their usual work to add fresh coats of paint to the mural.
"It's fun," said Christian Gibbs, 30, a senior back-end developer, as he repainted some green stalks of grass. "It's for a good cause — it's cool to have art in the city instead of everything being so plan."
James Baldi, founder of the Warehouse Agency, said the entire staff takes off one day a month to volunteer.
"It's a part of the city, a part of the fabric where we live," Baldi said of the mural. "We like to take care of our home."
Many local families stopped to watch the mural come back to life, and some even picked up a brush to help.
"We admire this every day," said Mary Gehlhar, a Battery Park City resident who was pushing her 3-year-old daughter along Chambers Street in a stroller. "It's a really interesting interpretation of Alice."
By the end of the day, the volunteers had made lots of progress on the eastern section of the mural, but Appleton said there was still plenty of work left to do.
Appleton hopes to schedule more volunteer groups, including current Stuyvesant students, over the next few months. Those who are interested can email info@cityarts.org.
