98The Crowd at the Hangar
Painted by Rapoport Academy students over three weeks of summer mornings, finished in July 2026 · on The Hangar, the homeless hospitality house Laurie and Dusty Kirk run in the quonset hut at 417 S 17th St, at Waco Dr · the figures are people the Kirks know from the street, painted so they are recognized as people, not as homeless · credited by Natalie Ward, who reached out to us; reported by KWTX, July 21, 2026MURAL
A rusted quonset hut with a party painted along its bottom edge — flat, faceless people in orange and red under a canopy of leaves. Every one of them is somebody the people inside know by name.
The top half of this building is a hundred feet of corrugated steel gone the color of dried blood with rust, curving up and over the way a quonset hut does. The bottom half is a garden party. The lower band is painted teal and filled with oversized tropical leaves in dark green and mint, a sprig of yellow blossoms hangs at the left end, and a crowd has walked in.
The people are flat silhouettes with no faces, cut in orange, brick red, deep brown and peach, and they carry themselves like people you know. A group of four stands at the left, one of them red-haired with a yellow bag strap across her chest. Further along, an orange figure sits between two of the hut’s little square windows with a brown dog at her feet. A man in a blue cap leans in near the middle. A monarch butterfly hangs over the right-hand windows, and a lone red figure waits at the far end, near the door. The four windows were there first; the painters worked around them so they read like windows in the party, which is a good trick.
They are people you know, or people the Kirks know. The hut is The Hangar, the homeless hospitality house Laurie and Dusty Kirk opened here in 2017 — not a shelter for the night, but a place under the 17th Street bridge where Waco’s unsheltered can shower, eat a meal and sit down with friends. The figures on the wall are drawn from the people who come through the door. Dusty Kirk told KWTX the point was that they get recognized as people, not as homeless, and that the mission is to make them feel like friends. Students from Rapoport Academy painted it over three weeks of summer mornings in 2026, finishing in July, and Natalie Ward, who has shepherded more than one student wall in this town, is the one who told us so.
It faces a gravel lot on the corner of South 17th and Waco Drive, which means most people see it at thirty miles an hour. Pull in.
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