A photographic walk around a Gothic Revival church

You do not need a guidebook to read a Gothic Revival church. You need forty minutes and a sidewalk. This photographic walk follows the outside of one such building in downtown Waco, pausing at each feature that tells you what the architect borrowed from medieval Europe and what the congregation added for its own century. By the end you will know what to look for on the next sanctuary you pass, and why the answer changes with every wall you circle.

The building is at 1300 Austin Avenue, on the corner of Thirteenth and Austin in Waco. The Texas Historical Commission recorded it as a landmark in 1990 under the subject code for Gothic Revival architectural style. It was designed by R.H. Hunt and built in 1925, during the ministry of the Rev. Cullom H. Booth. That dating matters for your walk: this is not a medieval church recovering from restoration, and it is not a Victorian copy reaching for a romantic past. It is a twentieth century building that chose Gothic vocabulary deliberately.

If you want a wider frame before you start walking, the overview of how the Gothic Revival church exterior fits into two thousand years of Christian building is a good place to stand still for a moment. Then put the phone away and look up.

Start at the corner and look up first

Stand at the intersection and let your eye travel the full height of the facade before you approach it. That is the first discipline of reading a Gothic Revival church: the style is vertical. Every element pushes the gaze upward, and the proportions are set so that the wall reads as taller than it measures. A walk that starts at eye level misses the point entirely.

What does the raised basement do to the silhouette?

The recorded description notes a two-story-equivalent brick structure resting on a raised basement. On the sidewalk you see the result. The main floor sits above street level, which lifts the whole composition and gives the building an extra step of height that a flat-to-grade church cannot claim. Brick carries the load. There is no veneer story here, no stone facing pretending to be something older. The color and texture of the wall are the color and texture of the clay.

The tower holds the corner

A prominent bell tower anchors the composition at the corner, which is why the first view from the intersection is also the best one. Towers in this tradition are not decoration bolted onto a roof; they are the organizing mass, the thing the rest of the front arranges itself around. If you want to understand how these structures work from the inside, the site's guide to bell tower ascent goes up through one, and the account of how the bells were hung and rung belongs to a different kind of visit than this one.

What you can see from outside is that the tower was meant to be looked at, and that it has been edited. The original tracery detail in the tower was removed by the 1940s. That is a detail worth holding onto, because it tells you something true about Gothic Revival buildings in Texas: they were built to be maintained, and maintenance decisions accumulate on them like weather. What you are photographing is not the 1925 drawing. It is 1925 plus every decision since.

Windows, tracery and the 1954 fire

Walk the length of the Austin Avenue elevation slowly, because the fenestration is where the style announces itself most clearly. The original art glass windows were replaced, along with the tracery detail in the sanctuary, after a fire in 1954 caused extensive damage. That fire is not a footnote. It is the reason the glazing you see is not the glazing the first congregation saw, and it explains why the window rhythm may read slightly differently from the tower above it.

For a closer reading of the vocabulary you are looking at, pointed arches, tracery patterns, buttress forms and the rest, the walk through Gothic Revival features breaks the terms down one at a time. Carry a few of those names with you and the wall stops being a single texture and becomes a sentence.

Which congregation worships here?

This is the Austin Avenue Methodist Church, and the landmark record places it within the Methodist Episcopal and United Methodist stream of Waco's downtown congregations. The Avenue Church A Documented page follows the congregation itself through the twentieth century, which is a different story from the building's. A church exterior is a photograph of a decision made in 1925. The people who made it, and the ones still gathering inside, are the part the brick cannot show you.

Walk the long wall and watch the light change

Circle the block rather than stopping at the corner. Gothic Revival exteriors reward a full lap because the style is designed to be seen from an angle rather than head on. The massing shifts as you move. Buttresses that read as flat stripes from the front show their depth from the side. Openings that were hidden behind the tower emerge. If you photograph anything, photograph the same wall twice, once in morning light and once in the late afternoon, and compare what the brick does.

What the wall leaves out

A Gothic Revival exterior is a selective quotation. It borrows the pointed arch, the vertical emphasis and the tower, and it drops the medieval structural logic that produced them in the first place. The Texas Historical Commission record describes the design as a substantial interpretation of Gothic architecture, and interpretation is the right word. What you are walking around is a nineteenth and twentieth century idea about the Middle Ages, rendered in local brick by a working architect.

Why the church looks different in 2026

Every feature you have passed has a date attached, and none of them match. The building: 1925. The tower tracery: removed by the 1940s. The sanctuary windows and detail: replaced after 1954. The landmark medallion: 1990. That is not decay. That is a building in use, which is the only condition under which this style has ever made sense. A sanctuary that no one maintains stops being architecture and becomes a ruin, and Waco has examples of both.

Where this building sits in the wider map

One walk is one building. The reason to take it is that it trains your eye for the next one, and the next block, and the ones across the river. The Waco sacred architecture section gathers the downtown sanctuaries, bell towers and stained glass into a single view, including the closed and reused sacred spaces that did not survive their congregations. Walk this one first, then walk the others with the same questions in hand.

The corner of Thirteenth and Austin is a public sidewalk, and the landmark record notes that the building itself is private property. Walk the exterior, take your photographs from the street, and leave the doors alone unless there is a service or an open invitation. That is the difference between reading a church and trespassing on one. The rest, the arches, the brick, the tower, the light at four in the afternoon, is free and always has been. Go on a weekday morning when the traffic is thin and the shadow from the tower falls across the Austin Avenue face. Then come back in November, when the sun is low all day, and see whether you recognize the building you thought you had learned.

The Waco Belfry editorial team / [email protected]

About the reference page

Church architecture on Wikipedia is the encyclopedia's overview of the architecture of Christian buildings, including churches, chapels, convents and seminaries, and how the form evolved over two thousand years. It covers the house church, the basilica model, the narthex, the atrium, the cruciform plan and the great cathedral traditions, alongside the simpler parish churches that were far more numerous. The page carries a citation maintenance notice dated March 2026.