43The Pictogram Column
Painter not on record · a vertical column of flat cream pictograms on the corner pier of River Square Center, where the grey-blue block meets the red brick · know who painted it, or when? Tell us.MURAL
The corner of an old red brick warehouse downtown, painted with a totem pole of cream shapes — the suspension bridge, the state, a bear, a basketball, a football.
River Square Center is a long four-story brick building near the river, red brick most of the way and painted grey-blue on the end block, with striped awnings over the ground floor. Where the two colors meet, at the corner pier, somebody painted a column of pictograms in cream from the roofline nearly to the awnings. Read it from the top: the suspension bridge with its cables, the outline of Texas, a bear walking, a basketball, a football, a stack of stripes, half-circles, wedges and triangles, and at the bottom a simple figure with a round head and a chevron body. The shapes are flat and hard-edged, cut into both the grey and the red so the column belongs to the corner rather than to either wall, and at sunset the cream catches the orange in the sky.
It is a Waco alphabet, more or less — bridge, bears, ball — done in the language of an airport sign. Nobody signed it that we could find, and we do not know when it was painted. If you know, tell us.
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