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It’s a big concrete canvas, this beveled wall underneath the railroad trestle at Davie and McGee.

Nine feet high. Seventy-five feet across. It’s a constellation of drawings and words, scrawled in white chalk. From across the street, even in the daylight, it looks like a bunch of squiggles. But move closer. You’ll see.

There’s a robot, a fish, a balloon with teeth, and an explosion of words everywhere you look: “Freak Out,’’ “Iridescent Panic,’’ “Gramaphone Soup’’ and “I Love You Tootsie.’’

Soon, this art gallery of chalk will disappear. In its place, on this concrete wall underneath the trestle’s east side, will be something more permanent.

It won’t be known just as the site where oversized trucks get stuck.

It’ll become a new conversation piece, a place where lights will instill safety and a huge new mural will try to entice anyone to cross the railroad tracks, the invisible walls that divide our city.

Maybe you’ve heard it. Cecilia Thompson has. Last spring, during a get-together with Greensboro’s young professionals, Thompson heard the complaint once again.

“I don’t walk to the other side of the tracks, especially underneath the bridge,’’ someone told her. “It’s so creepy down there.’’

It doesn’t need to be. Thompson knows that. She lives and works downtown. And that’s what got her thinking about a partnership between the nonprofit Action Greensboro and the local artist collective known as Elsewhere.

Or really, a partnership involving her peers, anyone under 30 who calls Greensboro home.

Thompson, 26, works for Action Greensboro; George Scheer, 29, helped created Elsewhere.  Together, they rounded up a cross-section of the community to help pull off this mural project.

They need another $10,000. They’ve already snagged $10,000 in grants from the Cemala Foundation and Community Foundation Public Art Endowment, and they’ve gotten the verbal OK from the trestle’s owner, Norfolk Southern .

Now, the hard work starts.

On Friday, as the sun began to set, they started gathering ideas for the mural in a very under-30 way — with a video camera on a downtown sidewalk, pointed at people interviewed inside the shell of a 1950s-type console TV.

A guy named Marvin came. He just wanted to sing Al Green. But at least 15 other people, all out for a Friday night, sat behind the TV box and gave their ideas about this mural for beneath the railroad bridge.

The ideas came quickly. Show diversity. Celebrate history. Celebrate the future. Be funky. Be fun. And be sure to capture the never-say-die spirit that has turned downtown

Greensboro from a ghost town to a party town.

Or a “mini-Asheville,’’ as one person said.

Capture that in a visually enticing space, another person said, where the steel girders underneath the trestle seem to play artistic tricks with shadow and light.

“Some people look at that (trestle) and think, 'Oh, that’s not very attractive,’ but you put lights in there, and man, it’ll be a beautiful thing,’’ said Hollis Gabriel, 54, a painter and art patron who moved to Greensboro from New Orleans last year.

“The focal point is to get to the other side of the tracks. Another whole world is over there.’’

The committee steering the project still has to raise more money, hire a mural artist and navigate the political minefield that has become public art in Greensboro.

But for the next few First Fridays — the city’s monthly arts hop — Thompson and others will be out in force downtown, filming and meeting people who feel ownership and pride for downtown.

There, in what some call the heartbeat of Greensboro, committee members expect to find some direction on what this mural is supposed to be. It’ll be finished next May.

But until then, who knows what they’ll discover.

But one thing’s for sure. It’ll be different.
 

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com