Seattle has certainly earned it’s place in rock and roll history from Hendrix to Pearl Jam. With all of the home-grown talent it struck me as odd when I heard about the 16 foot bronze monument of Lennon in the Fremont neighborhood known for it’s quirkiness. I had heard that the statue could be purchased so subconsciously I was thinking of John from the Beatles For Sale period.
Even stranger than paying respects to a Beatle in the land of Nirvana was realizing my mistake and finding an impressive statue of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in the land of Microsoft and Amazon.
The statue was removed from Lenin’s Square in Poprad, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) during the Velvet Revolution. A Washington teacher found the sculpture in a scrap yard while teaching in Czechoslovakia and mortgaged his home to bring it to Seattle but was killed in a car accident before it could be publicly erected. His family had it removed from his backyard and his estate is still trying to find an owner, it can be yours for about $300,000 (not including moving expenses).
Like so many transplants, the statue has become part of the neighborhood. It is regularly decorated for holidays, dressed in drag, painted like a clown and, proving to me once again that “timing is everything”, in 2004 masqueraded for a time as John Lennon.