57The Dream, Painted on a Bridge Pier

An electric interurban railway crossed the Brazos here from 1913 until the last car ran on New Year's Eve, 1948. The bridge carried cars for another quarter century, closed in 1973, and was pulled down in the mid-seventies — but the piers were left standing in the river. In 1988 the M&M/Mars plant in Waco paid to turn this one into an observation deck, and the plaque saying so is still bolted to the red panel at the base.

In 2004 County Commissioner Lester Gibson and a Waco businessman commissioned a mural for it, and the man they called was Ira Watkins — born in 1941, one of twelve children, raised right here, and by then long established in San Francisco. He painted Dr. King around every face of the pier: the March on Washington looking back toward downtown, King in a jail cell, King at a lectern, and the headstone, with the words from it lettered across the stone. The City of Waco dedicated it in January 2005.

One morning in July 2017 somebody came out here and painted red X's across it. The city said it would be repaired as soon as possible. Watkins flew back from California and repainted his own mural by hand, with Doreen Ravenscroft of Cultural Arts of Waco working beside him — the same woman who spent most of a decade getting the Doris Miller Memorial built four minutes upstream, and whose office you will walk past later on this same street. Their names are on the hand-lettered sponsor list at the pier's base, along with NeighborWorks Waco and City Center Waco, in the artist's own handwriting.

Stand on the deck afterward and look across. That is the 1869 Waco Suspension Bridge, and it is the reason the other trail on this site starts where it does. You can walk over it from downtown and arrive here on foot.