Public Profile

The Fremont Troll is an eighteen-foot concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a Volkswagen Beetle, located beneath the north end of the Aurora Bridge in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It was installed in 1990 as the winning entry in a competition organized by the Fremont Arts Council to repurpose a space that had become, in the neighborhood’s delicate phrasing, “underutilized.” The Troll weighs approximately six tons, has a single glinting eye made from a hubcap, and has been visited by an estimated two million people since its installation, none of whom have been able to explain to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s satisfaction whether it constitutes a permanent structure requiring a permit.

The sculpture was created by four artists — Steve Badanes, Will Martin, Donna Walter, and Ross Whitehead — who conceived of it as a guardian figure beneath the bridge. The Volkswagen Beetle clutched in the Troll’s left hand contains a time capsule that includes a bust of Elvis Presley, which the artists felt was “self-explanatory.” The Troll has since become the most photographed landmark in Fremont and the subject of a protracted jurisdictional dispute between the neighborhood, the city of Seattle, and the Washington State Department of Transportation, none of which are certain who is responsible for its maintenance and all of which would prefer that the question not be formally resolved.

The Troll has been classified at various times as a public art installation, a traffic hazard, a tourist attraction, a structural modification to a bridge abutment, and a community asset. It has never been classified as a troll, because the relevant municipal codes do not contain a category for trolls, a gap that the Fremont Arts Council has petitioned the city to address on four separate occasions.

Private Profile

Function in stories: The Fremont Troll exists as a landmark that defies institutional categorization. It is useful whenever a story requires a location in Seattle that no bureaucratic framework can adequately describe — a place that is simultaneously a sculpture, a tourist destination, a jurisdictional headache, and, to the neighborhood, simply a troll. Any attempt to deploy it for purposes other than being a troll — as a tactical position, a meeting point, a piece of evidence — should be met by the neighborhood with the bafflement of people being told that their troll is something other than what it obviously is.

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