19The Wall That Counted Down to Kickoff
“Wacotown” · widely attributed to Mark Cunningham with Eagle Eye Advertising and Waco’s design community, 2013 · Creative Waco’s public art map instead credits the Wacotown collective and dates the wall to 2012 · 219 S 4th Street · know who painted it? Tell us.MURAL
For one year this wall told the whole city how long it had to wait. The countdown ended. The gold stayed.
In 2013, when McLane Stadium was still a hole in the riverbank, this green brick wall became the city's kitchen calendar: WACOTOWN in huge gold script, with a number that changed month after month for a full year, counting down to the day Baylor football came home across the Brazos. Designers from around Waco took turns debuting the new numbers — a civic countdown, painted by committee, on a wall the size of a ballroom.
The stadium opened in 2014. The numbers stopped. But nobody had the heart to take the name down, and a decade of Texas sun has burnished it into something better — gold script gone soft at the edges, half signature, half ghost, glowing off the green like the whole wall is wearing Baylor colors on purpose. (It is. It always was.)
Creative Waco's public art map credits the wall to the Wacotown collective and dates its start to 2012 — and calls it the mural that started the ball rolling on a new arts-based vision for the city. Not bad for a calendar.