The Pershing Mural contains 763,000 tiles. That number gets quoted so often it starts to sound like trivia. On the wall it means something exact: every one of those tiles came off a downtown auditorium, got cleaned and sorted, and went back up on a wall that did not exist yet.
A Landmark Nobody Wanted To Lose
Leonard Thiessen and Bill J. Hammon designed the mural for Pershing Municipal Auditorium, which opened in downtown Lincoln in March 1957. Thirty-eight figures run across the facade playing ball, dancing, performing, a snapshot of everything the building was built to hold. At 38 by 140 feet, it was called the largest tile mural in the country when it went up.
Pershing closed in 2014 and the building came down a decade later. The mural did not have to go with it. A volunteer group, the Pershing Mural Historic Preservation Committee, raised $844,000 to get it off the facade ahead of demolition, and eventually $4.1 million to bring the whole thing back.
Taken Down One Tile At A Time
There is no machine for this. Crews disassembled the mural in 2022, tile by tile, all 763,000 of them, then spent close to three years scraping glue and grout off the backs, mapping where each piece belonged, and batching them into small square sheets for the trip back. One or two percent were too far gone to reuse. The rest of what you see at Wyuka is original 1957 tile.
A New Wall, Engineered For 150 Years
Foundation work started in May 2025. The mural now stands on a new wall measuring 50 by 150 feet, built from ten concrete panels, lifted six to eight feet off the ground and rising close to four stories, braced with fiberglass rebar and engineered to take a century and a half of Nebraska wind.
Substrate decides more than most people expect. Tile inherits every flaw in whatever sits behind it, and at this size a small error near the base turns into a visible break in a figure’s arm forty feet up.
570 Square Feet Per Week
Our crew joined the project in 2025 and spent a few months organizing the tile and producing final mosaic sheets ready for install. The first tile went up at Wyuka in April 2026. Installation progressed at 570 square feet per week until the last tile was placed on July 16, 2026, in front of the community.
The hard part was preserving the original orientation. Every sheet had to land square to the one beside it, because drift does not stay small across a wall measuring 50 by 150 feet. Asked what the real challenge was, owner Luke Holle told KLKN it was “maintaining the reverence necessary for it.”
There was also no procedure to inherit. Nobody alive had set this mural before, so the crew engineered its own methods as it went, section by section, and carried them forward to the next one. A clip from the warehouse, tiles batched into sheets and waiting their turn, picked up twelve million views while the work was underway.
Luke set the final square himself.
What A Mural Teaches You About Ordinary Work
A bathroom floor and a four-story mosaic run on the same discipline. Map the layout before a single piece gets set. Flatten and prep the substrate, because tile hides nothing. Check alignment often enough that drift never gets room to accumulate.
That is the standard behind every mosaic and restoration job we take, and behind the floors and feature walls and showers and tub surrounds we build in homes around Lincoln.
The mural is finished and open to the public at Wyuka Park, on the north side of the pond. It is worth the drive.
Sources
- Nebraska Public Media, after four years the Pershing mural is resurrected at Wyuka
- KLKN, Pershing mural is completed
- 10/11 NOW, first tile of the beloved Lincoln mural installed
- Lincoln Journal Star, 763,000 tiles and five years later
- Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, Pershing Mural project
- Protocol, an interview with Luke Holle about the project