Robin Lane Gets the City Talking With Sidewalk Chalk ON Thursday evening, Robin Lane was out there with his stick of chalk, standing at his spot on the northeast corner of Second Avenue and 33rd Street in Kips Bay, Manhattan. In the middle of the Midtown bustle, he dropped to one knee and began scrawling one of his chalk messages on the gum-pocked sidewalk. "New Yorkers tend to walk looking down, not up," explained Mr. Lane, who for the past 15 years has made a weekly ritual of creating an underfoot billboard on the same four-foot square of sidewalk here, never missing a week. Let the children have their Twitter and Instagram blips. Mr. Lane sticks to chalk on concrete. He calls the pre-weekend postings "chalk talk": newsy provocations for his neighbors to discuss. After a spate of gun violence this year, he wrote, "Bat Signal, get the guns off the street." Last year, as Tropical Storm Irene approached, he assured New Yorkers, "The sun will come out tomorrow, it's a hard knock life." And after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he left a simple "911" with the last two digits bent horizontally to suggest the fallen towers. "I usually go with what's topical," said Mr. Lane, whose messages are faded by feet and erased by rain within days. If not, he uses a bottle of water to clean the slate before writing his next one. The message on Thursday related to the day's news that the city had passed a ban on the sale of large sugary beverages. "NYC Bd of Health bans super size drinks," he wrote in six-inch-high letters. What's next condoms. "Oh, did the ban begin today?" asked a woman walking her dog. Mr. Lane did not look up, so the woman asked another pedestrian. "See, this is what I want," Mr. Lane whispered, "to stimulate conversation and just walk away." Mr. Lane lives halfway down the block in a rent-stabilized studio on 33rd Street. He is youthful and spry but reluctant to reveal his age because, he said, "that can hurt you in my line of work." His line includes performance art, magic, modeling and dancing, but he makes much of his living day trading. In other words, he is a typical Manhattanite, and as such, he has something to say. "I've always been an expressionist, and this is one of my forms of expression," he said, dressed in running shoes, rolled up slacks, shirttails and a green tie smudged with chalk. "I don't really want people to know it's me writing them, and I don't even want to discuss them," he said. Sometimes I come out and write them after midnight, just so I won't be seen. But he can rarely leave a message without some passer-by coming up and saying, "So, you're the guy." This is precisely what Marisa Koeppel said recently, having lived on the block and followed the messages for two years before she spied Mr. Lane in the act. "People notice them," said Ms. Koeppel, 30, a guidance counselor at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, as she happened upon Mr. Lane again during his writing on Thursday. Sometimes they're funny; sometimes they're controversial, or inspirational. Moments later, another woman walked up and blurted out: "Is that you? Oh, my God! The woman, Marisol Banuelos, 34, a bond saleswoman, told Mr. Lane that she had been photographing the messages and posting them to a Facebook album titled "33rd St & 2nd Ave Wisdom" since she moved to the block a year ago from Miami. Of course, not everyone loves the chalk. "Some building managers and irate neighbors have tried to tell me to stop, and I have to remind them about the First Amendment," said Mr. Lane, who grew up in the Bronx, attended St. John's University and took theater classes at New York University. He is a lifelong bachelor with no children. "Dealing with a woman is a full-time job," he said. My cats sleep in bed with me, and I don't think there's any woman in this neighborhood who wants to deal with that. His two aging cats - Sammy, 17, and Snowflake, 12 - are infirm and must be hydrated constantly through a tube, which takes much of Mr. Lane's time. My cats are my No. 1 priority," he said. "My doctor says my numbers - my cholesterol and other levels - are good, so I'd give anything to trade my numbers with my cats" numbers." And for viewers of his sidewalk scrawling, he said, "It gives them an anchor, like, "The messages are still here, so everything's O.K." " E-mail: character@nytimes.com