By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN —There are 99 ways to show us how to cross the road, and no two are the same.
A mural depicting pedestrian "Walk" signals from around the world has been capturing the attention of passersby since it first went up in January 2010 near a construction site on Church Street.
Creators replaced 24 of the figures in the Walking Men 99 mural with new images last weekend.
It now includes a standing man made of green dots from Tianjin, China, to a solid green man riding a horse used in London. Other figures are shown striding forward, pedaling bicycles and sitting in wheelchairs. Some wear broad-brimmed hats or ponytails, while others have stylized heads that are perfect circles.
"They're so different," said Maya Barkai, 30, the artist behind the project. "We don't really appreciate it. Only when you see them together do you get a sense of how rich this simplified vocabulary is."
Barkai's favorite of the 24 new signals is the one from Antwerp, which show a solid green man and woman walking together.
"The great thing about it is that the woman is leading the man," Barkai said.
A Jerusalem native, Barkai got the idea for Walking Men shortly after she moved to New York in 2002.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to replace all of the city's "Walk" signals with figures rather than words, a nod to New York's international population. Barkai had noticed during her travels that the signals differed from city to city, but she had no idea how much until she set up a website to collect photos of them from around the world.
Images flooded in, and soon Barkai had gathered enough for Walking Men 99, which surrounds three sides of Larry Silverstein's stalled Four Seasons condo-hotel project at 99 Church St. The mural is part of the Downtown Alliance's $1.5 million Re:Construction effort to beautify construction sites.
Even after the mural launched, Barkai kept getting new contributions from around the world, so when it came time to renovate Walking Men 99 to repair some vandalism, she decided to swap out some of the simpler images for more interesting ones. She also wanted to increase the geographical diversity of the project, she said.
Walking Men has attracted international attention, spawning a similar exhibit at PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art in Russia, along with a similar Men at Work series, as part of the Bat Yam International Biennale for Landscape Urbanism in Israel.
Barkai hopes the Church Street mural will stay up for at least another year.
