It's been a long time since the music of frogs was heard in Frogtown. We want to change that.

In St Paul’s most diverse and poorest neighborhood, environmental degradation has accompanied urbanization. The life-filled marsh that gave the neighborhood its name has long since been paved over, and the frog chorus has been silenced.

Frogtown Green, a resident-led, volunteer-powered neighborhood group, proposes to renovate a scummy pond in a barren parking lot, to create urban aquatic habitat and a venue for an outdoor, frog-themed percussion concert featuring drums and marimbas.

Around a new retaining pond on the grounds of a busy outdoor immigrant market, we will create an urban ecology education and concert venue that uses a beloved community totem—the frog—as a metaphor for neighborhood revitalization.

Hmongtown International Marketplace's large retaining pond, installed in 2104 by the local watershed district, currently serves simply to filter parking lot run off. Our one-of-a-kind project will beautify it and suggest a richer function, as a venue for environmental education and arts enjoyment for the hundreds of people who visit and work in the Marketplace. (See an aerial view of the marketplace and pond, at: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hmongtown+Marketplace/@44.9610366,-93.1088114,124m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x52b32ab26c7e039d:0x2bd068ffc8e504ae

By installing trees, benches, wetland and aquatic plants, and by offering educational and artistic programming around the retaining pond, our frog project will tell a new story: of a healthy, interconnected community.