Fremont, Seattle, Washington

Fremont
Seattle Neighborhood
The Fremont Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, seen from the grounds of the St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral complex, across Lake Union.
Country	United States
State	Washington
City	Seattle
City Council	District 6
Neighborhood Council	Lake Union District
Police District	North Precinct, B2
Legislative District	43rd
Established	Annexed to Seattle on May 3, 1891
Named for	Fremont, Nebraska
Area
• Total	0.89 sq mi (2.3 km2)
Population
• Total	11,345
• Density	13,000/sq mi (4,900/km2)
ZIP code	98103, 98107

Fremont is a neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. Originally a separate city, it was annexed to Seattle in 1891, and is named after Fremont, Nebraska, the hometown of two of its founders Luther H. Griffith and Edward 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 (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. A major shopping district is centered on Fremont Avenue N. just north of the bridge.

Sometimes referred to as "The People's Republic of Fremont" or "The Artists' Republic of Fremont," and at one time a center of the counterculture, Fremont has become somewhat gentrified in recent years. The neighborhood remains home to a controversial statue of Vladimir 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 (5 m) 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.