Taking the old steel bridge to Fremont has always been a bit like crossing into another universe. A gentler, funkier cosmos, full of old Volkswagen vans and Indian textile shops and possibly the only statue of Vladimir Lenin on a public street corner west of the Baltic Sea.
The bridge in fact opened the same year the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and since then has become the defining feature of this central Seattle neighborhood -- alternately called the "People's Republic of Fremont" by outsiders and "the Center of the Universe" by those who live there.
Now the blue-and-orange drawbridge suspended low over the Lake Washington Ship Canal has its own artist in residence, hired by the city to spend the summer in one of the span's cloistered towers to document what it means, exactly, to cross from the merely Seattle into Fremont.
The neighborhood is known for its playful public art -- from the 18-foot concrete troll under the nearby Aurora Bridge to the whimsical, participatory sculpture of streetcar passengers known as "Waiting for the Interurban." And being the official artist for a bridge both loved and loathed is a daunting task, Kristen Ramirez admits.
A pretty watercolor of the Fremont Bridge at sunset would get laughed back across the canal.
A metal sculpture of the bridge? Why repeat perfection? A fairy tale -- that's been done, with the neon Rapunzel whose hair cascades down from the bridge tower opposite Ramirez's domain.
So the 38-year-old college art professor who grew up in Northern California is spending her first weeks on the bridge sitting in her tower, watching and listening.
She photographs the barges laden with logs and gravel, the long-masted sailboats (the bridge, one of the world's busiest, opens an average of 35 times a day to accommodate the canal traffic), the motorists who fume and ruminate through the delays, the skateboarders and bicyclists who whiz by.
She records the whistle of the boats demanding passage, the low hum of the gears as the metal grates of the drawbridge arc upward, the whoosh of gull wings past her lonely tower.
Ramirez has put up posters all over Fremont, inviting people to share stories, sounds, myths and memories of the bridge. She blogs about her project, and is handing out a Fremont Bridge quiz that invites people to help in the building of a community metaphor.
