Meital Smith DOOMED HOUSE PUBLISHERS
Meital Smith
DOOMED HOUSE PUBLISHERS
GA BR IOL A I S L A N D, BR I T I S H COL OM BI A
Copyright c 2019 by Doomed House Publishers
Photographs c 2019 by Seattle Municipal Archive, Puget Sound Maritime History, Fremont Chamber of Commerce, and Grant Hindsley.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book, please contact permissions@doomedhousepublishers.com. Thank you for support of the author’s rights.
DOOMED HOUSE PUBLISHERS
835 Berry Point Rd Gabriola Island, British Colombia, Canada V0R 1X1
First Edition: February 2019 ISBN: 666-6-666-66666-6
Illustration and lettering by Meital Smith. Printed in USA.
dedicated to adobe illustrator may this be the start of a long, happy, healthy, relationship.
The Center of the Universe Signpost N 35th Street and Fremont AVE NE Photo Credit: Fremont Chamber of Commerce
Fremont
table of Contents
Introduction 1 history 2-3 The Bridge 4 The Parade 5 The Troll 6 The Lenin 7
Like any thriving city, Seattle is made up of a patchwork of flowering neighborhoods, each with their own histories, identities, and cultures that allow everyone to find a space where they fit. The North End boasts large parks and green spaces like Magnuson Park and Green Lake, the South End having a blossoming art scene and a large variety of ethnic cuisine. There are sections of Seattle that are the headquarters of cutting-edge business tycoons and tech corporations that are world renowned. There are other sections that hold onto the street markets of old, with bustling crowds and stall owners offering their wares, sections that are plastered with street art and stickers and peppered with hole-in-the-wall music venues and nightclubs. Fremont manages to hold its own among all of these other neighborhoods. There are five adjectives that describe Fremont: youthful, self-assured, artistic, extraverted, and wacky. While Fremont is currently going through yet another change, from being an artist and student infested area to a place with a larger corporate presence, there are many people and remnants that still make Fremont incredibly unique.
Because I grew up in Seattle, the impression I have of Fremont is very much colored of how it was in the early 2000’s and maybe that blinds me to what it really is now. I remember as a child going to a warehouse and seeing huge, colorful, paper maché puppets that people were going to wear in the Fremont Parade. I remember being in the parade itself, riding on the back of a four-wheeled bicycle that my dad had built, complete with a 10 foot-in-diameter, cloth and PVC pipe flower on the top of it. I remember going to the Fremont Pageant at Gasworks and seeing people run around with ribbons and flowing hair and dresses and a giant paper maché moon and sun. I remember taking a tour around Theo’s Chocolate as a 4th grader. Generally, as I got older, I didn’t spend as much time in Fremont because school starting taking up more of my free time, and my school was located in Capitol Hill. But, through rediscovering Fremont for this project, I am reminded what a cool and wacky little part of town it is, and it’s definitely nice to see parts of the Fremont that I knew and loved shining through the new, more corporate personality that the neighborhood is starting to take on.
youthful self-Assured extraverted artistic wacky
IntroDuction
1 The Land of Landmarks
Fremont
2
Top Left: The last really tall ship left in Lake Union narrowly escapes before the Aurora Bridge is completed in 1932. Photo credit: Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society. Top Right: The Fremont Car House in 1919. This building was the shelter for the Pacific Northwest Traction streetcars, and later became the Redhook Brewery and even later, the Trolleyman Pub. Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archive. Bottom Right: The opening day of the Fremont Bridge on June 15th, 1917. Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archive. Bottom Left: The Fremont Bridge opens almost 35 times a day! Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archive
3
The Land of Landmarks
Fremont is a neighborhood that has had many faces, each population making the unique area their own. The neighborhood was named after the town in Nebraska, which founders L.H. Griffith and E. Blewitt hail from. Fremont got its first successes in the forms of a lumber industry, several shingle mills, and an iron foundry. It was also an area that was very much benefited from the rail and trolley industries. Fremont was a hub of sorts for railroads running as locally as Woodland Park and Greenlake, to as far as other cities, such as Everett. The rail industry had a lasting effect on the infrastructure of the neighborhood. The Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railroad created the path for the future Burke-Gilman trail, the foot and bike path and greenway that runs through Seattle and further. The company known as Pacific Northwest Traction, the railroad company that was responsible for the interurban rail line between Everett and Seattle, built a brick “cabarn” that housed the streetcars. This building was in use until April 1941, when the last of the Seattle streetcars made its last run, and would later become the home of Redhook Brewery, and following that, the Trolleyman Pub.
“Waiting for the Interurban” is a statue in close proximity to the Fremont bridge that immortalizes people who took the Interurban Line, a train that went from Everett to Downtown Seattle that did its last run in 1939. In typical Fremont fashion, the statue is often decorated or “vandalized” by the locals, especially during holidays. Credit: Meital Smith
The decline in rail public transit in the 1930’s and 40’s hit Fremont hard, dropping property values and therefore, rent prices. However, this made space for people such as students and artists to come and reshape Fremont in their image, as the neighborhood became one of the more affordable places to live in Seattle, and it is pretty close to the university. This transformation from a low income, sort of seedy area into a flowering artistic, counter-culture neighborhood really started gaining ground in the 1960’s. Fremont started to rebrand its image as “the community that recycles itself”, an “Artist’s Republic”, and, modestly, “The Center of the Universe”. By the 1990’s Fremont had begun to go through yet another change, one that has continued to the present. While the wackiness of the 60’s Fremont can still be found in the many off-beat and unique public art around the neighborhood and the Fremont Summer Solstice Parade that started in the early 1990’s and is still going strong, the introduction of corporate offices has changed the neighborhood’s identity. Corporations such as Getty Images, Tableau Software, BEA Systems, Sporacle, Groundspeak, and, most notably, Adobe and Google, have moved in, and people that have lived in the area for a while are lamenting that they have “yuppified” the neighborhood.
History
“The Center of The Universe”
Fremont
4
Above: The Fremont Bridge opening to let a ship through. It has a 30 foot vessel clearance, so it is opened quite often. Photo credit: Fremont Chamber of Commerce.
the bridge
Right: An illustration of the Fremont Bridge. Credit: Meital Smith.
There are several aspects of Fremont that make it so unique from other neighborhoods in Seattle. The first aspect is the relationship between the people of Fremont and the Fremont Bridge. The bridge was designed by F.A. Rapp and opened on June 15th, 1917, connecting Westlake and Fremont Avenue. Its original color was a dull green. In 1972, it became time to repaint the bridge. The Fremont Improvement Committee chose “Fremont Orange” as the new color, and community loved it. Unfortunately, even though the paint was supposed to be able to withstand Seattle’s climate, the color faded after just 12 years to a dullish, pinkish color. So, in 1984, the city engineering department offered the Fremont community several colors to choose from for the new makeover of the bridge. Their options were: Pickle Green, Canal Blue, Nutmeg Brown, Pirate Gold, and Sky Gray.
The mayor of the city himself, Charles Royer, donned a pair of overalls and painted a patch of each color on the bridge so the community members could get an idea of what each color would look like. Then, people could vote at the Fremont Street Fair of which color they wanted the bridge to be. A curveball came in the form of self-described mayor of Fremont, Armen Stephanian. He was very passionate about the bridge being repainted in Fremont Orange, so he pushed for people to write in Fremont Orange on their ballots. In the end, Canal Blue swept the race with a whopping 1,153 votes, but Fremont Orange came in second, with 253 votes. A compromise was reached, wherein Fremont artists designed a blue and orange color scheme, blue being the main color with orange accents. This color scheme has survived a repainting in 1997, and remains to this day.
The Fremont Solstice Parade is a long-standing tradition in Fremont, dating back to the 1990’s. It was founded by Barbara Luecke and Peter Toms, who, after moving from San Francisco, missed the experience that they had in the San Francisco Summer Solstice Celebration as a way of bringing the community together, and decided to organize Fremont’s very own Solstice Celebration. The parade has 3 codes: that it is completely open to the public to view, volunteer, or participate in, that there are no motorized vehicles (excluding aid vehicles), and that it is comprised of pure artistic expression; in other words, printed words and logos are strictly prohibited. One of the more well-known traditions of the Fremont Parade is the procession of naked bicyclists that paint their bodies in creative ways, such as Care Bears or Wonder Woman or just crazy colors.
Rule 1: open to the public Rule 2: No motorized Vehicles Rule 3: Pure Artistic Expression
The Land of Landmarks
The Parade
5
Left: The hoarde of naked bicyclists await their turn to go in the 2017 Fremont Solstice Parade. Photo Credit: Grant Hindsley
Fremont
6
The Troll One of the most unique aspects of Fremont is its wacky public art. Arguably, the most famous example of this is the Fremont Troll that lives under the Aurora Bridge. It came into being through an effort to transform the area under the Aurora Bridge from a sketchy outdoor dump into something that was more positive for the community. So the Fremont Arts Council was asked to put together an arts competition to create a sculpture that would occupy the space. The artists Steve Badanes, Ross Whitehead, Donna Walter and Bill Martin were inspired by the Norwegian folk tale of “Billy Groat’s Gruff”, and created a massive troll crushing a Volkswagen Beetle using a combination of wire, rebar steel, and 2 tons of concrete. The street that leads up to the troll was even renamed Troll Avenue in 2005.
7
Another notable public statue in Fremont comes in the form of infamous Vladimir Lenin, located at the corner of Evanston Avenue North and North 36th Street. The statue’s former home was in Propad, Czechoslovakia, but in 1989, when revolution struck and the location became Slovakia, all of the (many) statues of Lenin around the area were ripped down and discarded. Issaquah native Lewis Carpenter, who was teaching in Propad, found the sculpture and deemed the piece an amazing display of craftsmanship, and therefore embarked on the incredibly expensive process of bringing it back to Seattle, and it found its home in Fremont. The statue serves the purpose of reminding us that art has the tendency to outlive politics.
The Lenin Left: An illustration of the Fremont Troll by Meital Smith. Right: An illustration of the Lenin Statue by Meital Smith.
Thee Land of Landmarks rks
The text of Fremont: The Land of Landmarks is set in Modern No. 20, designed by Stephanson Blake in 1905, and Chantal, designed by Rian Hughes in 2005. This book was designed by Meital Smith. Composition by Doomed House Publishers on Gabriola Island, British Colombia. Photographs by: Fremont Chamber of Commerce (Photographer). Seattle, Washington: Fremont: Center of the Universe. Hinsley, Grant (Photographer). (2017). Untitled [photograph]. Seattle, Washington: SeattlePi. Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society (Photographer). (1932). Untitled [photograph]. Historylink.org. Seattle Municipal Archive (Photographer). (1917). Fremont Avenue Bridge [photograph]. Seattle, Washington: Seattle Municial Archive. Manufactured by tiny little ants running through colored ink, and then trotting in formation atop acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper. Only 66 ants were harmed in the making of this book.
Because I grew up in Seattle, the impression I have of Fremont is colored of how it was in the early 2000’s. I remember as a child going to a warehouse and seeing huge, colorful, paper maché puppets that people were going to wear in the Fremont Parade. I remember being in the parade itself, riding on the back of a four-wheeled bicycle that my dad had built, complete with a 10 foot-in-diameter, cloth and PVC pipe flower on the top of it. I remember going to the Fremont Pageant at Gasworks and seeing people run around with ribbons and flowing hair and dresses and a giant paper maché moon and sun. I remember taking a tour around Theo’s Chocolate as a 4th grader. Through rediscovering Fremont, I am reminded what a cool and wacky little part of town it is, and it’s definitely nice to see parts of the Fremont that I knew and loved shining through the new, more corporate personality that the neighborhood is starting to adopt.
DOOMED HOUSE PUBLISHERS
6 666666 666666
835 Berry Point Rd Gabriola Island, British Colombia, Canada V0R 1X1