93Syrup on the Suspension Bridge

Stand back from this long brick wall off Lake Air Drive and you are looking at the Waco Suspension Bridge: four pale towers, the big arch, the railed deck running away from you through it. Then you notice what is holding it up.

The name is melting. Syrup runs out of the H in Harold and the s in Waite's, comes down through the sky in two thick ribbons, arcs over the towers in the exact curve a suspension cable makes — and then keeps going, down the brick and into the biggest breakfast in Texas. Pancakes stacked six and eight high. Strawberries. Whipped cream. Coffee, and a glass of milk built to the scale of a bridge tower. It is a painting of a landmark that is also, structurally, a painting of a pour.

ESTABLISHED IN 1961 says the banner, and it is not exaggerating. Harold and Yveta Waite opened Harold Waite's Pancake & Steakhouse that year. Yveta — everybody called her Y — carried the co-founder's title to the end of her life; she died in 2003, at eighty-four, and the family kept the griddles going. Sixty-odd years of Waco has had breakfast here before work.

The wall is signed Tony Bryant, 3-27-16, with his phone number painted right beside his name — which is exactly how he signed the drive-thru bear at Poppa Rollo's, half a mile east of here at stop 45. Bryant came to Waco from Georgia by way of Atlanta, where he had illustrated for Ted Turner's companies, and stumbled into his first Waco mural work while buying art supplies. Poppa Rollo's was his first wall in this town. This one is the same painter a few years on, handing a pancake house the city's own front door.