‘Love Letters for the Midway’ is crowd-sourced ode to a neighborhood - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

Artist Hawona Sulivan Janzen poses with a couple of her signs, 100 in total, that make up a love poem for the Hamline-Midway neighborhood St. Paul on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. The signs are scattered around the Hamlin-Midway neighborhood in people’s yards and boulevards. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“Neighbors give me parsley.”

“Your spring rolls are divine.”

“I told you your butterflies were purty.”

On Halloween this year, 100 yellow signs went up in lawns and windows scattered throughout St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, in no apparent order. Together, they form a 100-line, crowd-sourced poem called “Love Letters for the Midway,” which seeks to bring neighbors a positive message in hard times.

The project “started as a dream, believe it or not,” St. Paul artist Hawona Sullivan Janzen said.

Before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, she dreamed she was walking through the neighborhood and saw something like a skywriter in the clouds, writing messages above people’s houses about how their neighbors were great, or that their puppy was missing.

“All that was sort of my brain’s way of processing many of the conversations that were happening online in the Hamline Midway Neighbors group on Facebook,” she said. “But I had never thought about what the dream was about until I couldn’t shake it as several days went by. I would be driving down the street and I would suddenly see a house that had been in my dream and I was just really curious, like, why is this dream sticking with me so much?

“I finally realized, ‘I think I’m supposed to do something with this. I think I’m supposed to tell our neighborhood story in some kind of way,’” she said.

Sullivan Janzen reached out to the Hamline Midway Coalition’s then-director, Kate Mudge, and proposed the poem idea. It came to life three years later with a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

“I just wanted the project to be a moment where as one was walking down the street and encountering this text, they could pause and experience some moment of joy, even on a really difficult day,” Sullivan Janzen said.

Sullivan Janzen started a Google Form where Midway residents could tell a story or write what they loved about their neighborhood. She then turned their words into the poem.

“I was able to just translate all the love that people were showing to each other into the lines of the poem,” she said.

Sullivan Janzen also commissioned artists to build six little free libraries for the neighborhood. Those libraries now hold small works of art from local artists and have been used during the pandemic for everything from canned food distribution to bike helmet giveaways.

“I’ve gotten confirmation that humanity still existed, even when you couldn’t be together,” Sullivan Janzen said.

The signs will stay up till Jan. 10. Janzen hopes that by the summer it will be possible to celebrate with a picnic with all the signs and neighbors in one place.

For more information and a map of where the signs can be found, visit the project website at Hamlinemidway.org/lovelettersforthemidway.

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