A Selection of Statues

Lenin
In Fremont, the time-honored practice of erecting a statue to commemorate a historical event or honorable person is turned upside down. The 16-foot-tall and seven-ton bronze statue of Lenin is a case in point: part accident, part experiment, part provocation. The sculptor was Emil Venkov, who labored over it for ten years, and the statue was installed in Poprad, in present-day Slovakia, in 1988.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 the statue was quietly taken down, and was due to be melted for its bronze when it was discovered by Lewis E. Carpenter, a Washington native who was teaching English in Poprad. Recognising its artistic value, he remortgaged his house and bought it, and shipped it back to the States -- much to the consternation of the Seattle community. There was then an unexpected twist: In the midst of all the uproar, Carpenter was killed in a car crash.

The statue was left lying in his backyard, and his family have been trying to get rid of it ever since. They got it off their property and set up in Fremont in 1995, and it is currently for sale for $250,000, proceeds to go to the Fremont Chamber of Commerce for community art projects. In the meantime, its controversy is a source of glee for the community, which alternates between promoting it as Art, and dressing it up as John Lennon.

Troll
Familiar to us all from Scandinavian folklore, the myth of the troll has been made quite literally concrete underneath the Aurora Bridge. The two-ton creature squats in the darkness, single hub-cap eye gleaming, and crushing a Volkswagon Beetle -- with a California license plate -- in its left hand. It was created by a team of four local artists in 1990, with the aim of rehabilitating the space. Today, instead of a dark corner for dumping tyres and dealing drugs, it is a tourist attraction. The moral, we must assume, is bring on the trolls.

Dinosaur
What more could Fremont want? Well, a true-to-scale topiary model of an apatosaurus was a notable absence until 2000, when the Pacific Science Center serendipitously decided to sell its pair of ivy-clad dinosaurs for the bargain price of $1. They were relocated to the edge of the Ship Canal, where they forage happily today just as they did 150 million years ago.