68Welcome to the Eastside

This is the wall people photograph, and they are right to. It is built like a set of old luggage labels stacked into a grid: ELM in tall white capitals along the top with Ave tucked under it in gold script; WELCOME in slab capitals; to the; and then, across the middle in a big generous white script with an underline swoosh, Eastside. Around them, in their own colour blocks: 1849. WACO in a white square. REVIVAL running vertically up the right side. The zip code — 76704 — in enormous outlined numerals along the bottom, which is the most East Waco thing on the entire wall.

Every block is a Waco reference and the painter meant all of them. The green pennant reads PAUL QUINN COLLEGE — founded by the AME Church in Austin in 1872, moved to Waco in 1877, renamed for Bishop William Paul Quinn in 1881, and gone to Dallas in 1990 after more than a century on this side of the river. The black silhouette is a Columbian mammoth, for Waco Mammoth National Monument. 1849 is the year Waco was founded. The Texas is just Texas.

It was painted in 2019 by Will Suarez on the end wall of Revival Eastside Eatery, and it functions exactly as a gateway sign should: you come up Elm Avenue, you see it, and you know you have arrived somewhere that has decided what it is called.