The neighborhood's small center is comprised of two short strips: Fremont Avenue heading north from the Fremont Bridge to N. 39th Street, and a few blocks of N. 36th Street as it veers west off Fremont Avenue toward Ballard. Both streets have an eclectic bunch of shops, cafés, bars, and small businesses. The area also contains most of Fremont's sights.

Beneath the Aurora Bridge at N. 36th Street lurks the 18-foot-tall Fremont Troll, clutching a Volkswagen Beetle in his massive left hand. The giant watches over the neighborhood, and even allows people to crawl up onto his shoulders for the obligatory photo. The troll appeared in 1991, commissioned by the Fremont Arts Council. Like all of Fremont's sculptures, he can't escape a little playful decoration -- around Halloween, he's given a bicycle-wheel rim as a nose ring and a giant spider crawls on his shoulder.

When Russian counterrevolutionaries knocked over a 7-ton statue of Lenin in 1989, they couldn't have known it would end up in Fremont. A man named Lewis Carpenter toted the statue from Slovakia to Seattle in 1989, and when he died in 1994, it made its way to the neighborhood's Sunday flea market. Soon ousted from this den of capitalism, the bronze Bolshevik now stands proudly in front of a burrito joint on N. 36th Street, between Fremont and Evanston avenues. During Gay Pride Weekend, the commissar is sometimes decked out in pink (skirt, hat, lipstick, and pasties) from head to toe.

Fremont's signature statue, Waiting for the Interurban, is a cast aluminum sculpture of five figures, one holding a small child. The Interurban was a light-rail system that operated in the '40s. Residents enjoy dressing and ornamenting the figures for just about any joyful occasion, from retirements to birthdays to declarations of love. Look closely at the dog circling the legs of one figure and you'll see it wears the face of a bearded, ornery-looking man. As the story goes, the onetime honorary mayor of Fremont, Armen Stepanian, was upset with Richard Beyer for choosing himself as the artist to create the statue when no one else applied to the Fremont Arts Council for the job. Beyer had the final word in the brouhaha by putting Stepanian's face on the canine. The sculpture's home is on N. 34th Street, just over the Fremont Bridge at Fremont Avenue.

On the corner of N. 35th Street and Evanston Avenue, look up to spot the 53-foot, Russian-built Fremont Rocket, which marks the official center of the center of the universe.

There's a lovely stretch of the Burke-Gilman Trail along the canal on the west side of the Fremont Bridge. Watch kayakers and small craft float down the river; several benches along the path make it easy to linger for hours.