59The Windows That Look Back a Hundred Years

They are built like shop windows: black frames, four panes each, set flush into red brick at eye level. But there is no shop behind them. Each frame holds one huge black-and-white photograph by Fred Gildersleeve, Waco's photographer of record in the early 1900s, and the effect on the sidewalk is genuinely disorienting — you keep expecting to be able to step through.

The first is the Paul Quinn College Choir and Orchestra, 1909. Forty-odd singers on the grass in white dresses and dark suits, a clarinet, a mandolin, a violin, children cross-legged along the front row, everyone holding still for a long exposure on a bright day. Paul Quinn College was founded in Austin in 1872, moved to Waco in 1877, and stayed for over a century before it left for Dallas in 1990. Its campus was here, in this neighbourhood. That is why its name keeps turning up on the walls further up this walk.

The second window looks east down a dirt street toward the Suspension Bridge, back when the bridge still had its castellated towers and the wagons were four-mule teams. You can read the storefronts: DRY GOODS. GROCERIES. B. ALEXANDER. EATING SALOON. A man in a hat stands in the middle of the road, in no danger whatsoever, looking straight at the camera.

The originals live in The Texas Collection at Baylor. These are out here on the street, for free, at the exact size that lets you find one face in a crowd of forty.