Your Waco Weekend

From an early visit to Skellington Curiosities to the premiere of The Dark Overlords of Waco documentary , this story traces the slow construction of a community outside Waco’s norms. For people who don’t neatly fit inside a city’s approved categories, choosing to live without apology widens the gap between visible output and the invisible labor required to keep a scene alive. What emerges isn’t a...

This episode begins with two stories that seem unrelated—new regulations for food trucks in Waco and a proposed 520-acre data center north of town—but collide once you pay attention to how information spreads locally. What looks like confusion or overreaction is often something else: people trying to orient themselves before anything feels settled. Local reporting doesn’t just produce facts; it pr...

At the Performing Arts Community Center (PACC ), Russell Campbell’s paintings aren’t shown under spotlights or separated from daily use. They hang on a wall where people go to and from classes, work on laptops, and leave half-finished projects behind them. There’s no signal telling you how to look or what kind of attention the work expects. This episode considers what happens when art isn’t framed...

Washington Gallery in downtown Waco has serious art waiting for you. On the surface, it’s simple enough: you see paintings. In practice, the encounter is shaped by pressure about how to look, how to feel, how to say something that proves you were paying attention. Then, art shows up again without ceremony on a utility box at a Waco Drive intersection . Seen once, it’s odd. Seen repeatedly, it beco...

Most people only see Waco at 75 miles an hour. From Interstate 35, it’s a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else—Baylor’s campus, a few landmarks in the distance, gas stations and frontage roads blurring together before you move on. This episode takes a different route. Instead of the highway, we follow the 18th Street corridor—moving laterally across Waco, block by block. Neighborhoo...

The latest Analog event begins as a night of storytelling in an old grocery store now used by University Baptist Church. On the surface, it’s a handful of speakers taking turns at a mic. In reality, it’s a study of ordinary people trying to make sense of themselves in front of a room willing to listen. This episode looks at what happens when a community builds a stage out of whatever it has—foldin...

Sergio’s Food Truck , once a downtown institution, now sits silent in an alley behind Austin Avenue. And as The Waco Bridge reported , it’s more than the story of another business that’s shut down; it’s a cautionary tale. This episode follows how the arrest and deportation of Sergio Garcia fits into a broader statewide and national pattern . The result? That quiet alley becomes a lens on what Waco...

Shorty’s Pizza Shack opening a location in Hewitt should be a straightforward story of expansion, but nothing about it is that simple. Instead, this episode looks at how a Baylor student hangout becomes a family hub the minute it crosses Highway 6. It's not about pizza—it’s about the ways neighborhoods absorb the places we think we already know. What emerges is a sense of how identity travels,...

Waco gets talked about in all kinds of ways—too small, too hyped, too bland, too glossy—and each version clips something essential from the city’s real story. This episode looks past the slogans and the social feeds to examine how those perspectives shape our sense of place and why so many of them end up feeling like shortcuts. What emerges is an argument for noticing the particular: the imperfect...

At Vintage Mío , downtown Waco’s vinyl record shop, every album jacket gleams in its plastic sleeve, but the real story lies between the records—often misfiled and mismatched, treasures waiting to be found. Ry Cooder lurks next to John Coltrane in the jazz section, and Charles Mingus hides in soul. One Saturday’s small discovery—a 1970s German reissue of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Indestr...

For 150 years, the Waco Suspension Bridge has stretched across the Brazos River—first as a toll bridge for cattle drives, later as a civic landmark rebuilt more than once to keep pace with the city it helped create. Its towers have seen drovers, parades, protests, and over a century’s worth of Waco reflected in the slow water below. Today, it connects more than geography. The bridge still carries...

In East Waco, just off Elm Avenue, Brotherwell Brewing feels like a backyard that grew into a brewery. On a cool October afternoon, people gather at picnic tables while kids chase each other around a bald cypress, and Ghostface peers from a mural on the fence. Inside, the air smells of malt and hops, a foosball table clacks in the corner, and a Simple Minds song drifts through the speakers as the...

After midnight in Waco, most of the city hums in neutral. But at Las Trancas, people line up under glowing yellow bulbs to order tacos, burritos, and nachos in a cracked parking lot while a fan kicks napkins across folding tables and the smell of sizzling meat hangs in the air. Orders bounce in English and Spanish; a ranchera drifts from the radio as tripas, pastor, and lengua hit the grill. A lat...

The Waco Downtown Farmers Market unfolds each Saturday morning on Bridge Street Plaza in East Waco—white tents in neat rows with plenty of coffee, local food, and sunlight bouncing off the new hotels nearby. Live music drifts from the stage beneath orange steel panels while kids toss beanbags and couples linger over cold brews. It looks like the picture of civic renewal—a city’s self-portrait in p...

Pinewood sits under a giant post oak on Austin Avenue, two halves split by a courtyard—coffee on one side, beer on the other. Inside, sunlight slides across concrete and wood, grinders hum, and the day drifts from americanos to IPAs without missing a beat. But the real story isn’t the drinks. It’s the parking lot across the street—a decade-long standoff that turned from rivalry into a rare act of...

Garibaldi’s greets you with a storm door, not a glass façade. Inside, hand-lettered specials on neon poster board taped to a fridge advertise pozole and enchiladas beneath a silent TV. It feels more like stepping into a cousin’s kitchen than a restaurant. The food matches the room: migas smothered in cheese, burritos wrapped in foil, beans and potatoes served without ceremony. In a city where down...

Treasure City Flea Market has been a cornerstone of La Salle Avenue since 1985, but its story begins four decades earlier as the Circle Drive-In Theatre, where Robin Hood’s son once swashbuckled across a brand-new screen in Technicolor. It’s a story of car-window speakers and X-rated double bills, pink Stratocaster knock-offs and Day of the Dead pinups—and a weekend mercado that still carries the...

Kitok ’s has been feeding Waco since the mid-'70s, but it was the invention of its Oriental fries—a tangle of tempura-battered potatoes, onions, carrots, and parsley—that turned a neighborhood burger joint into a local legend. It’s a story of burgers and bulgogi, soy sauce and ketchup, family kids doubling as waiters, and a restaurant that still embodies Waco’s weirdly wonderful mash-up identity....

Visitors to Waco flock to the newest restaurants downtown, but the city’s real flavor lives further up 18th Street, in between tire shops, sketchy corner stores, and abandoned gas stations. This week, Your Waco Weekend takes a trip to Dubl-R Burgers , a North Waco landmark since 1996, where handmade patties, Texas toothpicks, and a noisy cross-section of locals keep Old Waco alive. ----- Hit subsc...

William Cowper Brann was Waco’s most notorious voice at the end of the 19th century—a journalist who built a national following by attacking politicians, preachers, and Baylor University itself. He had a gift for outrage, a talent for cruelty, and an uncanny ability to make enemies everywhere he went. In this episode of Your Waco Weekend , we visit his grave in Oakwood Cemetery and trace the arc o...

Once upon a time, Waco turned into a demolition derby and called it a movie—but somehow nobody noticed for thirty-five years. Action U.S.A. is wall-to-wall fireballs, cars flying over school buses, and a Corvette tearing through Cameron Park like physics was just a rumor. It’s dumb, loud, and absolutely glorious—the best love letter Waco ever mailed to Hollywood, postage due. ----- Hit subscribe s...

Texas Music Cafe may not look like too much from the outside—just another storefront on Waco’s quiet 6th Street. But inside? The walls are close, the stage is in your face, and suddenly you’re in the middle of a show that could blow your hair back. Past performances include blues legend Classic Ballou, guitar renegade Ian Moore, and Hamell on Trial (whatever the hell that was)—all of it filmed and...

Papa Joe's Texas Saloon is an honest-to-God Texas roadhouse perched on the edge of an I-35 frontage road south of Waco, equal parts neon mirage and last-stand bunker for anyone who knows country music died with Merle Haggard. It's the kind of beer joint where time doesn’t move, it settles in —and where every creak of the floorboards and swig of Lone Star feels like a dare. ----- Hit subscr...