MAGNOLIA
opened Magnolia Table, a restaurant they made over from what once was the historic Elite Café, on Waco’s famous traffic circle just off Interstate 35.
Carla Pendergraft, marketing director for the Waco Convention Center & Visitors Bureau, noted that in 2014, visitors to Waco numbered 650,000. As of 2018, the number has more than quadrupled, to 2.7 million. Of that total, 1.6 million are Magnolia visitors.
Thanks in large part to what Waco calls the “Magnolia Effect,” 11 new hotels are going up. Upscale restaurants are opening, and people are living downtown — not under bridges or in roachridden motels, but in spiffy lofts and condos in venerable restored buildings on Austin Avenue.
Long-neglected Elm Street in East Waco is slated for an ambitious makeover. The city’s other attractions — the zoo, the Dr Pepper Museum, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, the Waco Mammoth National Monument — are enjoying increased attendance.
“It’s like a gold-rush town,” Pendergraft said. Most of Waco’s visitors used to come from around Texas, she added. Now they come from all over this country — and from other countries.
When I did a column a few months ago about the little town of Calvert, on Texas 6 halfway between Houston and Waco, a local antiques dealer told me about the Magnolia Effect on her business. “Fixer Upper” fans fly into Bush Intercontinental Airport and drive up to Waco. Suitably inspired and energized after their visit, they stop and spend money at her shop on the way back to Houston.
Doing my journalistic due diligence one recent Wednesday morning, I had Magnolia Table’s “country breakfast” (two eggs, peppered bacon, homemade tater tots and biscuits). Wait times for a table can be as long as three hours — the food is good, but I’m not sure any breakfast is that good — but since I was alone and happy to sit at the counter, I didn’t have to wait.
At the large table behind me was Emily Leupp, a young woman affiliated with a religious group at Oklahoma State University. She and 12 colleagues at the table had attended a conference in Dallas and took an extra day to make the Magnolia pilgrimage (the restaurant, the shop, the “Fixer Upper” home tour). It was her first time in Waco.
“I like it that she ( Joanna) is a Christian,” Leupp said. “Also, their aesthetic appeals to our generation.”
After breakfast, I joined shoppers streaming into Magnolia Market at the Silos, despite 36 degree temperatures and steady rain. Indianapolis attorney Robert Henke and his wife were visiting their son in Dallas for the holidays but took time for the Magnolia side trip. Neither had ever been to Waco.
“The tourists who come for the Magnolia phenomenon are not price-sensitive,” Pendergraft said, using what must be a visitors’ bureau term. In other words, they spend money around town, not just at Magnolia — money that ends up in the pockets of Wacoans.
Californians are moving in. They’re buying down-at-theheels houses and fixing them up in the Chip and Joanna style. While they’re bringing money to town, they’re not bringing a California attitude, Pendergraft has observed. They seem accepting of local mores and a more relaxed way of life.
Pendergraft said she wonders if they’re seeking a Texas-style Mayberry.
Waco, my Waco. I’m old enough to have eaten at the Elite before Elvis Presley did (when he was stationed at nearby Fort Hood). I remember the F5 tornado that roared through my hometown in 1953, taking the lives of 114 people and ripping the heart out of downtown. Waco tried to recover with a pedestrian mall, an ill-conceived scheme that left the city’s oncevital business district gap-toothed, empty and sad. It stayed that way a long time.
I remember the Branch Davidians siege, of course, not to mention the biker shootout at Twin Peaks, and the Baylor football and basketball scandals.
“For a long time it seemed like our hometown existed in the shadows of a dark storm cloud,” Chip Gaines noted in his breezy little book, “Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff.”
Pendergraft contends that the dark cloud was dissipating even before the Magnolia phenomenon took hold. Baylor’s $266 million McLane Stadium on I-35 at the river turned heads and prompted second looks toward a town accustomed to being ignored. Chip and Joanna were the accelerants.
Pendergraft also would remind any starry-eyed Mayberryseekers coming to Waco that the old town on the Brazos still has its problems, including stubborn poverty and an over-abundance of substandard housing (an abundance that fueled Chip and Joanna’s success). And, predictably, success brings its own problems: more traffic on Valley Mills Drive, higher housing prices, higher property taxes.
“It’s been a shock to Waco,” Pendergraft said.
So will it last? Chip and Joanna are moving on to bigger and better things. They’re partnering with HGTV parent Discovery on a new network. But what about Waco? Will the Magnolia phenomenon continue to nurture the town’s prosperity?
Pondering that question — still an open one, it seems to me — reminds me of another Waco tale: When President Bill Clinton appointed my old friend Lyndon Olson to be ambassador to Sweden, the Waco native was living in New York. As he prepared to board a flight to Waco before assuming his post in Stockholm, a LaGuardia airport baggage handler glanced at his ticket.
“Waco!” he said (with a smirk). “Why would anybody want to go there?”
Lyndon had an answer back then: “Waco’s home.” And a surprisingly large number of people have an answer today. A positive answer. Having grown accustomed to the dark storm clouds, Wacoans are still getting used to that happy notion.