The Fremont Rocket

This guide to the Fremont Rocket in Seattle follows a 1991 radio tip that sent Fremont Business Association merchants racing to buy a Cold War-era fuselage before a Belltown surplus store scrapped it for parts. It traces the nearly three years spent arguing over how to stand the salvaged piece upright, finally hoisted at North 35th and Evanston in June 1994. Fremont's self-declared status as the Center of the Universe runs through the story, alongside its motto for freedom to be peculiar and its unlikely neighbor down the block, a bronze statue of Lenin salvaged from Slovakia.