Frogtown residents speak out on St. Paul’s Saxon Ford site development on Central Corridor

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A bowling alley, a water park, a community center for the elderly, a pharmacy, hospice care, and green space were just some of the many ideas that residents came up with for the redevelopment of the largest vacant site in Saint Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood.On Wednesday, February 19, the University Buffet was transformed from a restaurant into a city planning workshop for 18 Frogtown area residents, two city workers, and 13 Corridor Development Initiative staff and consultants. “Are we ready to create and envision what our community is going to look like?” asked workshop facilitator Sheronda Orridge, as she started the meeting. The Frogtown Neighborhood Association, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and the City of Saint Paul have teamed up to put on four workshops about the redevelopment of the Saxon Ford lot, located at 253-255 University Avenue in St. Paul. The city bought the lot a few years ago. The goal of these workshops is to provide the city with information about what Frogtown residents want to see in their community.The next workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 5 and will include a panel of developers. The fourth and final workshop will be on Wednesday, March 19 and will be used to summarize the information gained in the first three meetings into developmental guidelines and to get a consensus from the participants on these guidelines. Continue Reading

Home is where the art is: Extreme Home Makeover on the Central Corridor

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For Lucy Whitley Mott, 10, home is “where I have a roof over my head.”For Julie GebbenGreen, 47, home is less location-specific and more “sacred.”Whitley Mott and GebbenGreen traced projected images of the spaces they think of as “home” onto green canvases at a community art project on February 11. They met at the Hamline Midway Library as part of Artify’s THIS IS HOME community art project. Their work is currently on display on the 1300 block of University Avenue at the future location of a Project for Pride in Living (PPL) affordable housing development.Witt Siasoco, who runs the THIS IS HOME project with fellow Minneapolis-based artist, Mischa Kegan, was inspired by Artify’s theme of “Home is…” and his previous work with teens at Project Offstreets, a homeless-drop in shelter. “I had been working there for a year trying to figure out a project that would really speak to them,” he said. “And I came up with an idea about them talking about places they’ve lived and places that have felt safe to them.”Siasoco said that the THIS IS HOME project is similar to his work at Project Offstreets because it’s people “talking about where they’re from, and what feels like home to them.”All of the 22 participants are residents of the Hamline-Midway or Frogtown-Rondo neighborhoods. Continue Reading