AUSTIN - A whimsical frog mural near the University of Texas at Austin campus that's become illustrative of the city's unique culture has gone from near demolition to fine art this week after community protests prompted a restaurateur to preserve the frog at an estimated cost of $50,000.

Fort Worth businessman John Oudt said he thought the 10-foot frog painting, accompanied by the words "hi, how are you," was graffiti on the building that he rented to open a Baja Fresh Mexican Grill.

But when workers started marking the frog to cut windows for the California-based franchise, Oudt was quickly confronted with protesters and local TV news cameras.

"I mean I was flabbergasted," Oudt said Friday. "It really caught me completely off guard."

The mural, named after "Jeremiah" the bullfrog in Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World," has received a great deal of media attention, including an article on the Rolling Stone magazine Web site.

Daniel Johnston, a Texas singer-songwriter, artist and cult hero, said he painted the frog about 10 years ago, when the building on the University "drag," an area across the street from the western border of the campus, was still home to the Sound Exchange record store.

"He is the innocent frog," Johnston said. "He never meant anybody no harm. Please let him stay."

Craig Koon, a former manager of the record store, said he commissioned Johnston to make the painting with a can of black paint, a paint brush, "around $100 and as many records as he could carry out that day."

"He went up on the ladder - it took him about an hour or two - and that's just what he did," Koon said.

The friendly frog, with its tentacle eyeballs and smiling lips, has greeted visitors to the campus area ever since. It also gained notoriety as the design for a T-shirt, one of which was worn publicly by the late Kurt Cobain, guitarist and singer for Nirvana.

Dan Solomon, a screenwriter who lives three blocks from the mural, said he was alerted to the frog's planned destruction Tuesday morning on a community Web site. His feelings for the frog spurred him to schedule an afternoon protest.

"None of us woke up that morning thinking we were going to be frog activists, but it sort of worked out that way," Solomon said.

He said the frog is a quirky reminder that Austin is a little different.

"It kind of represents an Austin attitude where it's friendly but it's still a little bit subversive," Solomon said.

Confronted with the protests, Oudt conferred with his business partners, and they agreed to work around the mural.

But it won't be cheap. Oudt said the restaurateurs must first redesign the wall and then seek a revised city permit. That will take time, pushing the restaurant's opening to April.

Oudt said he and his partners will lose revenue for each day the restaurant's opening is postponed. He said it's impossible to predict how long the redesign process will take or how much revenue the restaurant will lose, but he estimated that it will cost about $50,000 to preserve the mural.

"It's not completely altruistic," Oudt said. "We thought that it would be a terrible idea to come in here and antagonize a large group of people. You hope when you do something like this that you're getting some good will out of it."

Johnston is certainly appreciative. Reached by telephone at his home in Waller, Texas, Johnston said he would volunteer to paint more characters on the inside of the restaurant, if asked.

"I'm really happy that some people were out trying to stop it from getting taken down," he said.

ON THE NET

Daniel Johnston: www.hihowareyou.com