Aurora Park was the site of an ill-fated Saint Paul Winter Carnival Ice Palace in 1896. Weather didn’t cooperate and the palace had to be scaled back from a more grand size. Fort Karnival was more of an ice stockade and was designed by military personnel from Fort Snelling. It was built with two toboggan slides, a tower, a Native American village with 200 Dakota camping there, warming rooms and a restaurant and other features inside. One fun feature of the toboggan slide was that they were in opposite directions, so riders could travel down one and then the other.
The palace glittered at night thanks to extensive lighting. Fireworks above wowed the crowds. But rain ruined the planned storming of the palace and that event had to be postponed.
The next ice palace in Frogtown was built in 1937, where the State Office Building is now. That year’s carnival featured singer Rudy Vallee. Huge crowds gathered to see and hear him, see the parades and see the ice palace.
Crews used 30,000 ice cakes and worked 16-hour days in bitter cold weather to get the fortress-like palace built. Roaring fires were used to heat water to join the ice cakes together. Many of the workers were happy to be busy, because so many jobs had been lost in the great Depression. The 1930s ice palaces were designed by city architects and built through the federal jobs program, Works Progress Administration or WPA.
The palace was a 193-foot long wall, with peaks of up to 60 feet. After carnival it was blown up with dynamite.
In the 1920s when the Midway Club (now Midway Chamber of Commerce) revived the Winter Carnival, West Minnehaha Playground was one of the activity sites. Playground would nominate neighborhood girls as queen candidates and businesses would enter floats and marching units.
Frogtown’s railroads and industries had marching groups in the 19th and early 20gh century carnivals. After the 1930s carnival revival, Frogtowners held their own neighborhood parades and activities at times. Not surprisingly, the Frogtown Marching Club’s colors were green and white. The marchers would make noise with metal, frog-shaped clickers as they marched.
]]>Aurora Park, also known as the Dale and Aurora Grounds or Comiskey Park, was Frogtown’s minor league baseball park. In 1895 Charles Comiskey started Saint Paul’s team in the fledgling Western League. Comiskey was one of the great first basemen of his day. While retiring from active play Comiskey decided to start a team, the Saint Paul Saints. He did play 17 games for his team so the retirement was sporadic.
In spring 1895 he began building a ball park in the area bounded by Dale and St. Albans streets, and Aurora and Fuller avenues. The grandstand and bleachers seated 3,000 spectators.
Comiskey quickly discovered that people would rather watch games for free from a nearby hillside. He put up additional bleachers to block the view. On the morning of the first regular-season game, Tuesday, May 7, 1895, the St. Paul Pioneer Press stated, "The advantageous position on the hill has been blocked by a high row of seats on that corner of the park, and that congregation of person who would otherwise probably not pay their half-dollar to see the game will be disappointed."
Small children then began boring holes in the ballpark fence, more than 200 holes in all. Comiskey fought back by building a second fence, six inches inside the first one.
But a bigger problem was the outcry from folks who opposed Sunday baseball as sinful. Foes got a judge to grant an injunction prohibiting Sunday games, so Comiskey had to move games to Minneapolis and to a ballpark on Saint Paul’s West Side. He held Sunday games elsewhere in 1895 and 1896, moving all games to the new Lexington Park at Lexington Parkway and university Avenue in 1897. Lexington soon replaced Aurora Park and the land was sold for other uses.
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