Fremont is a neighborhood in Seattle. Named after Fremont, Nebraska, the hometown of two of its founders, L. H. Griffith and E. Blewett, it is situated along the Fremont Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal to the north of Queen Anne, the east of Ballard, the south of Phinney Ridge, and the southwest of Wallingford. Its boundaries are not formally fixed, but they can be thought of as consisting of the Ship Canal to the south, Stone Way N. to the east, N. 50th Street to the north, and 8th Avenue N.W. to the west.
The neighborhood's main thoroughfares are Fremont and Aurora Avenues N. (north- and southbound) and N. 46th, 45th, 36th, and 34th Streets (east- and westbound). The Aurora Bridge (George Washington Memorial Bridge) carries Aurora Avenue (Washington State Route 99) over the Ship Canal to the top of Queen Anne Hill, and the Fremont Bridge carries Fremont Avenue over the canal to the hill's base.
Sometimes referred to as "The People's Republic of Fremont," and at one time a center of the counterculture, Fremont has somewhat gentrified in recent years. The neighborhood remains home to a controversial statue of Lenin salvaged from Slovakia by a local art lover who was teaching in the area at the time. After the 1989 fall of the communist government, he brought the statue to Fremont with money raised through a mortgage on his house. In addition to Lenin is the Fremont Troll, an 18-foot tall concrete sculpture of a troll crushing a Volkswagen Beetle in its left hand, created in 1990 and situated under the north end of the Aurora Bridge. The street running under the bridge and ending at the Troll was renamed Troll Avenue N. in 2005. In addition, signs throughout Fremont give such helpful advice as "Set your watch ahead five minutes", "Set your watch back five minutes" and "Throw your watch away." Other landmarks include an old rocket fuselage [1] and the outdoor sculpture Waiting for the Interurban.
Courtesy of Wikipedia.org