Photo by Ken Lampton
If you’ve been to Trader Joe’s on Lowest Greenville, you, like other neighbors, might’ve noticed a mural called Tango Frogs.
East Dallas real estate agent Ken Lampton sent me the picture above after he saw it and, as he says, “stopped dead in his tracks,” instantly taken back to the 1980s.
Those who have been in the area for a while might get the reference, but for those who don’t, the murals are a tribute to the six 10-foot-tall dancing frog sculptures by famed artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade that once donned the rooftop of Shannon Wynn’s Tango nightclub.
“Me and my wife were real, certifiable card-carrying yuppies then, and we were so pleased when Tango opened up because we felt like Greenville was finally going to be a place for people like us,” Lampton told me. “Because it was real rough down there.”
But then, there was a whole hullaballoo with Dallas City Hall about the sculptures violating the durn sign ordinance, and the dancing frogs were eventually taken down and taken to Willie Nelson’s Biodiesel Truck Stop near Hillsboro, Texas (where, I believe, some of them still are now).
“So seeing the Tango Frogs mural in Trader Joe’s, to me, it symbolizes my early hope that Lower Greenville would eventually be upscale,” Ken Lampton says.
If you want to read more about the back-and-forth City of Dallas drama, Lampton wrote a great story about it on his website.
As to how the mural came to be in Trader Joe’s, store captain Karen Campbell says when she and the crew were brainstorming ideas for the store murals, they went up and down Lower Greenville, chatting with store owners and other neighbors, asking them about the culture and history of East Dallas. While inside one of the nearby restaurants, someone suggested they do a tribute to the Tango Frogs. After researching the story, the crew decided that was exactly the kind of material they wanted on their walls. “It’s pretty interesting,” Campbell says.
