A Local’s Guide to Fremont

Fremont calls itself the Center of the Universe. We didn't come up with that, some guy put up a sign decades ago, and the city just let it stick. That tells you everything about this neighborhood before you even get here: mildly unhinged, extremely confident, somehow correct anyway.

Start at the troll. Everyone does. There's an eighteen-foot concrete troll living under the Aurora Bridge, permanently crushing a Volkswagen Beetle, and it's been down there since 1990 minding its own business. Tourists climb on it for photos. Locals walk past it the way you'd walk past a mailbox. Go early if you want it to yourself, because by noon it's a full photo-op traffic jam.

Then get chicken. Ezell's isn't cute or ironic about it, it's just correctly seasoned fried chicken that has made people reroute entire road trips, including apparently Oprah, who once had it FedExed to her. You don't need a reason to go. Hunger is a reason.

Third stop, and we're not going to be falsely modest about this one, is us. Many Bennies. We make ice cream a few blocks from all of this and we've accepted that we're a mandatory stop on a guide about our own neighborhood, which is a shameless thing to do, and we're doing it anyway. We don't dress up flavors with fifteen adjectives. We make ice cream that's good and a little strange, and let the ice cream do the convincing instead of us. Come by when your legs start complaining from all this walking, ask what's new, we'll tell you the truth about it even if the truth is "it's weird."

After that, walk it off at Gasworks Park. It's a former gasification plant turned public park, so you're technically having a picnic next to industrial ruins, which is either unsettling or the most Seattle thing imaginable depending on your mood. Great skyline view, especially if you climb the kite hill, and there's something very calming about eating ice cream near decommissioned machinery.

Last stop, Seawolf Bakery. Small, no frills, and their croissants and sourdough are good enough that people just accept the line without complaining about it, which never happens in this city. Grab something for the walk home, or honestly just eat it standing outside the shop like everyone else does.

That's the loop. Troll, chicken, us, park, bakery. None of it makes total sense written out like that, and it doesn't need to. Just come do it.