114The Ice Box

Under the covered walkway of a Hap’s Icehouse on North 39th, next to the Reddy Ice chest and the EBT sign, an airbrush artist got a whole wall. A penguin fills the left side in a black ball cap with the brim flat, a string of pearls and a pendant that spells Chill. A polar bear fills the right in a white fur coat, dark sunglasses and a gold chain with an igloo hanging from it, one paw up like it is checking a watch. Between them, a bag of ICE drips icicles, and a shield up top says A Hap’s ICE BOX in gold on blue. The whole thing is done in that soft, glowing airbrush style — every highlight a sparkle, every shadow a fade. Around the corner the wall keeps going: a low strip of translucent ice cubes, the address 1905 painted in white beside the door bars, and past that a blazing orange sunburst with a jagged blue box in the middle of it, like a doorway blown open.

Keep walking to the white block side wall facing the parking lot and Santa Claus is waiting — but not the one from the department store. This Santa wears yellow-rimmed sunglasses, has a cigar clamped in a grin full of gold, and holds up a glass bottle with MILK lettered down the side, raised like a toast. The red suit and white fur trim are all there, the curly white beard too, but the whole face is street: smoke curling, stars sparkling, the pipes and conduit of the building running right across his shoulder as if he had been painted around them.

Santa is signed. The orange tag on the right reads @SKCOOBAVELI #DOO THE DOO — the handle and the hashtag Skcoobaveli Trevino puts on his work, and he is already on this trail for the pizza-slice sunrise at Slow Rise on MLK. Stock Christmas played perfectly straight in the wrong register is his trademark, and Santa fits an ice house on North 39th just fine. The penguin and the bear out front carry no tag, only the store’s name in the shield. The glow, the sparkles and the sunglasses-on-everybody feel like the same hand to us, and we think Trevino painted both walls — but we think it, we do not know it. If you know for sure, or know the year for either wall, tell us.

The store itself sits on the corner of North 39th and Parrott, a neighborhood grocery, ice and snack stop that has been on record here since at least 2016, keeps long hours seven days a week, and has a second location, a Hap’s over on Summer Avenue. The name is older than the store. Before refrigerators, Texans bought ice by the block from neighborhood ice docks, and Waco had a big one: the Geyser Ice Company, founded in 1892 by beer magnate Adolphus Busch on an artesian well at 927 Webster, was hauling two hundred tons of ice a day out to ice stations across the city by the 1920s. Ice docks started stocking milk, bread and beer for the customers who were already stopping by, and stayed open late — the Dallas ice-dock company that did it best, starting in 1927, grew into 7-Eleven. In Texas, icehouse still means the corner store that grew out of one, and a wall that sells ice with a penguin in pearls is squarely in that tradition. Who founded a Hap’s, and when, we could not find out. If you know, tell us that too.