There's a parking lot at Sixth and Franklin where people park a hundred times a day and never once look up.
Look up.
Three stories of ghost-pale paint hang on the back of the Praetorian Building. Christ, arms stretched wide before a cross, inside a great circle, floating over the faded outline of a city. In one medallion, the U.S. Capitol dome and a cluster of church steeples. In the other, a Russian Orthodox cathedral, onion domes and all. And at the base of the cross, four words in English — then the same four words in Russian.
NOT ONLY FOR US · НЕ ТОЛЬКО ДЛЯ НАС
It has been 1990 on that wall for thirty-six years. This is the strangest, sweetest chapter in Waco murals history — and almost nobody knows it's up there.
The year the Cold War came to a Waco parking lot
Picture it. The Berlin Wall is down, barely. The Soviet Union is still very much a country. And into a parking lot in downtown Waco, Texas walk three people with brushes: Barbara Allinbloom, an American artist and Waco resident; Gregory Semyonoff, a Soviet painter; and — as the credit reads — Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Tarelkine.
Together they painted a three-story triptych and gave it to the city, a gift from the artists and from Allinbloom's parents, Fred and Ruth Williams, who helped fund it. Creative Waco's public art map describes it as the first Soviet-American joint art venture of the glasnost era. Not in Washington. Not in Moscow. On the back of an office building in Waco.
And the message was never anybody's victory lap. The mural's whole argument, painted three stories tall in two alphabets, is a warning that an arms race threatens peace and the planet for everyone — that neither empire owns the future. Not only for us.
The flag they refused to paint
Here's the detail that gives me chills every time I stand in that lot.
Beneath the two medallions hang two draped flags. And in 1990, the artists made a choice that reads like prophecy: they would not paint the hammer and sickle. Under the Russian cathedral they painted the old, pre-Soviet tricolor instead — betting, more than a year early, that the flag would outlive the regime.
In December 1991, it did. The Soviet Union dissolved, and the "wrong" flag on a Waco wall quietly became the right one.
Seven stories of second chances: the Praetorian Building
The wall itself has lived a life. The Praetorian Building went up between 1913 and 1915 — one of Waco's early high-rises, Chicago School style, designed by the Dallas firm of C.W. Bulger for the Modern Order of Praetorians, a fraternal life-insurance society whose Dallas tower was billed as Texas's first skyscraper. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
Then it spent decades collecting names the way other buildings collect tenants: Service Mutual Building. Southwestern Building. A Veterans Administration office. Franklin Tower. And then, from 1973 to 1989, sixteen straight years of standing empty — Baylor's Texas Collection traces the whole timeline.
Which makes the mural's timing almost too good. In 1989 the building finally came back to life under a new name: Williams Tower. And here the story clicks together — Creative Waco records that the building's owners at the time were none other than Fred and Ruth Williams, Allinbloom's parents, the same couple who helped fund the mural. The family that pulled the Praetorian out of sixteen empty years gave its own back wall to peace. A second chance, with a blessing painted on it.
The epilogue is quietly perfect. Restored again starting in 2013, the Praetorian today holds loft apartments, BRÜ Artisan Coffee Works at street level, and the working artist studios of Anthem — an entire building of people making art, with a glasnost-era peace mural keeping watch out back.
Say the names again
Thirty-six Texas summers have not been kind. The mural has faded to a ghost of itself, a whisper of gray where bold color used to be. And the fading isn't only paint: Visit Waco's own murals page now credits the piece simply to "Unknown Russian Artist." The names are slipping away faster than the picture is.
So this post gets to do the one small act of preservation a wall can't do for itself. Barbara Allinbloom. Gregory Semyonoff. Alexandre Tarelkine. Waco, 1990. Not only for us.
Allinbloom, for the record, never stopped giving Waco art. Years later she served as project manager of the Waco Sculpture Zoo — the same trail of bronze animals we spin our own tall tale about in The Long Walk to the Zoo.
Go look up — here's how
The Heart to Heart mural is free, outdoors, and visible any hour from the public lot off 6th Street and Franklin Avenue, behind the Praetorian Building at 601 Franklin. It's Stop 6 on the Franklin & the Square stretch of the Waco Walls trail, with its own map pin and story on its trail page.
Two tips from someone who keeps ending up in that parking lot: go in soft light — morning, or a good overcast — because a ghost image photographs best without glare. And go expecting a whisper, not a spectacle. This one isn't for your feed. It's for you.
Then keep walking, because this block is generous. Next door is a hand-painted furniture sign that looks long gone and very much isn't. A couple of minutes on, Van Gogh's sky gets whisked by a giant egg beater, and around the corner six stories of painted leaves are tied up with a bow. Grab a coffee at BRÜ on your way through and make an afternoon of it.
Every stop is free. Every stop is outside. All it costs is looking up.