120The Choir of 34th Street

At driving speed this is just stripes. Stop the car and it resolves: the same figure, repeated nine times across the wall in perfect formation — brown bodies folded like waves, faces stitched in tiny coral hatch-marks, and behind every single head, a round golden halo. Now look at the heads again. Those are not animals. Each one is a person wearing a wolf — the wolf's head pulled over like a hood, white eye and red muzzle pointed forward, the human face looking out from underneath. Nine people clothed as wolves, gliding under the words SHOP BROOKVIEW HILLS. We call them the choir for the halos; Creative Waco, who restored the wall alongside the artist, is the one who pointed out the wolves. A rather different metaphor than a choir — make of it what you will.

The halos turn out to be well earned. This midcentury shopping center was the neighborhood's beating heart forty years ago — mom-and-pop shops, customers on foot — and then it sat mostly empty for a long, long time. Now a multi-million-dollar rebuild is underway, and the City of Waco itself took to calling the project the Miracle on 34th Street. The mural arrived like a promise ahead of the tenants: paint the welcome committee first, and the neighborhood will follow. Two blocks up Bosque, the gorilla duo holds down the other end of the strip — this stretch of road is quietly becoming a gallery row.

The hand behind it is Mick Burson — Waco-born, based in Albuquerque, the same artist who wrapped the Dr Pepper Museum's back wall and painted the matchbox building on Barnard. He put this one up in 2014, and in 2026 he came back for it: Creative Waco's ARTprenticeship interns and mentors, led by Stephen Uhey, scraped, primed and repainted the wall with Burson guiding the process and picking the updated colors, and developers Cameron Philgreen and Jon Mark Buckner commissioned the restoration. A mural whose own artist returned for it, twelve years on, at a shopping center the city calls a miracle.