Fremont

This guide to Fremont in Seattle starts at the traffic island where a 1994 vote by the Metropolitan King County Council declared the neighborhood the actual Center of the Universe, complete with a guidepost pointing toward the North Pole and Atlantis. You'll hear how a struggling mill town's artists and shopkeepers engineered the stunt to shed its rough reputation, building on momentum from an existing solstice parade and Sunday market. Along the way it takes you past the neighborhood's other oddity, a bronze Lenin statue salvaged from a Czechoslovak scrapyard.