Goodbye Fremont!

As I mentioned a while back, I’m moving this weekend from Fremont (where I’ve lived for the last three years, meaning the whole life of this project) up to Pinehurst (a neighborhood in the northeast corner of Seattle, north of the much more well-known area of Northgate – which is where I’ve been telling everyone I’m moving to, since locals will almost always know where Northgate is but may not know of Pinehurst – I suppose one of the benefits of writing this for a non-local audience is that I can call neighborhoods whatever I want, since you probably aren’t going to recognize any of the names I spit out! 🙂) Since there are a lot of interesting things about this neighborhood that don’t fit neatly into a normal store series, I decided I’d put together this special post to highlight the non-retail side of the neighborhood!

I’ll start with arguably the most famous Fremont sight, and one that’s just over a block from my old apartment – the Fremont Troll! That link has the background on the sculpture, which as you can see here is also a bit of a playground for people (especially tourists) who love to climb all over it! During the summer (tourist season), this area is wall-to-wall people and cars lining up to get a view – it got old fast living near this destination.

Speaking of the Aurora Bridge, here are a couple pictures looking under it across the Ship Canal. I’m particularly happy with how the second of these pictures turned out! I know my old iPod camera would have choked on the contrast between the shadow under the bridge and the bright sun beyond.

Here are a few views along the Ship Canal from the Burke-Gilman Trail, featuring the Fremont Bridge (the even cooler local bridge -- and yes, the Fremont Troll is under the Aurora Bridge, not the Fremont Bridge, which always confuses tourists!). The buildings along the Ship Canal in the last picture are the original Google Seattle campus, since expanded to a pair of large new buildings in South Lake Union. I strongly suspect that this section was the testing ground for the Street View bikes way back in 2009, with all the Google people lined up to wave to the Street View guy!

Fremont is full of public art (it's not just the troll!), some less well-known than others. One of the more oddball sculptures is the Fremont Rocket, which has a rather convoluted history that can be seen in that link (the summary is that it’s not actually a rocket, but part of a C-119 military airplane!). Across the street is a large model of Saturn, sitting on the roof of a random apartment building (its ring is apparently a big solar panel, which is cool!).

Even more convoluted is the history of Fremont’s Lenin statue, and you’re really going to have to read that article because the backstory is just too complicated for me to summarize. What’s really interesting about this one is that it’s actually a Soviet-era monument from Slovakia! Anyways, as you can see, this is another interactive art installation, often being dressed up, or even more frequently having one of its hands painted red.

Let’s get back to “normal” public art! This is “Waiting for the Interurban”, probably my favorite of the local art pieces. It’s a depiction of, well, people waiting for the Interurban streetcar that ran through Fremont in the early 1900s. It’s also often dressed up, or used to hold flags or signs, like the earth day flag in the first picture.

Right across the street from that is the Fremont PCC (a local, extremely upscale grocery chain). It’s housed in what’s probably the most interesting modern apartment building in Seattle, which isn’t shown well here but can be seen better in Street View.

And last but not least for this art tour is the Center of the Universe signpost! This sign was actually stolen a while back, but was quickly replaced with a new one. With the exception of the troll, all these art pieces are within two city blocks, and the troll is only a couple blocks further away – there’s a serious concentration of art here, and that’s something I’ll certainly miss in my new neighborhood. (And yes, all the other art pieces are referenced on the signpost!)

Fremont also has a very nice historic library, designed in the mission style, which is very rare for Seattle. It’s a Carnegie library built in 1921, and it certainly doesn’t look much like what I’d think of as a standard Carnegie library, but that’s just another cool thing about the neighborhood!

Heading out of downtown Fremont, here’s a look at a couple cool old bookstores in what I’d consider the East Fremont business district. Nothing much to say about this, but I just thought these two storefronts look cool – especially the B. Brown one on the left, with the cool Bauhaus font.

That picture was taken on the way over to Gas Works Park, one of the most popular parks in Seattle despite being an abandoned industrial site and in some ways a toxic waste dump (the two big hills in the park are artificial mounts built to contain contaminated soil and other remnants from its industrial use)!

This first panorama is taken from the smaller of the two hills, off to the left of that first picture. From left to right, we have the playground, a large section of remaining industrial equipment, and Kite Hill (the main hill in the foreground of the first picture).

And here’s the view from Kite Hill itself, showing its panoramic view over the whole of Lake Union, with the South Lake Union/Downtown skyline in the middle and the Aurora Bridge and downtown Fremont off to the far right. In the bottom right is the odd art piece that adorns the top of Kite Hill, which is supposed to be a sundial of some sort but I can’t figure out how it works. By the way, apparently this panorama was too big for the software I use, since it kept wanting to make pictures that look like this:

Yeah, that’s not exactly what I was going for, Hugin!

Here are a few more views of the park, showing the abandoned equipment, the view from one of the lower-level overlooks, and the playground that includes more old equipment from the original coal gasification plant. I would have loved a playground like this when I was a kid! Yes, that does say “CLIMB ON STRUCTURES”, not "DON'T"! And believe me, if it wasn’t for COVID and how much Seattleites are panicking about that, this park would have been packed on such a nice day!

Finally for this set, let’s look at my favorite spot in this neighborhood, which I sadly only discovered a few months ago when I was already planning to move out. This is Fremont Peak Park, a small pocket park up on the top of Phinney Ridge (and barely within Fremont proper). As you can see from the moon phases embedded in the concrete entry, this place’s art has an astronomy theme.

It’s also got a cool sundial thing in the main part of the park – again, not sure how it works, but it looks cool! But as you can see, the star of the show is the background…

And what a view it is, looking out over lower Ballard (the Ballard Fred Meyer can be seen in the bottom center, and a few other Ballard sights that I haven’t gotten around to posting yet can also be barely seen in this picture). Further back, you can see Magnolia (one of Seattle’s fanciest neighborhoods), the Kitsap Penninsula, and (on an exceptionally clear day earlier this month) the Olympic Mountains – my old home!

And that seems like a decent note on which to end this special post. I’ll be back on Monday, with either normal posts or a Pinehurst/Northgate special, depending on how much time I have over the weekend to get pictures and put something together!