Fremont Foundry, birthplace of Seattle’s Lenin, Hendrix statues, sold | Arts & Culture

The Fremont Fine Arts Foundry gave birth to two of Seattle’s most famous statues – Fremont’s Lenin and Capitol Hill’s Jimi Hendrix. Now, the 31-year-old artists’ space has been sold to three young investors who plan on converting it into a restaurant and office space for their wine-accessory business.

The Foundry was started by Pete Bevis in 1981. He intended the two-story building at 154 N. 35th St., which includes studios, a gallery, a stone-carving yard, a sculpture garden, a darkroom and more, as a Mecca for artists.

And, for a time, his vision for the space was a reality. In 1995, the statue of Lenin an Issaquah resident had cut into three pieces and shipped from Slovakia was reassembled at the Foundry and erected a few blocks away. Two years later, artist Daryl Smith utilized the Foundry to craft the bronze Jimi Hendrix statue that now resides on Broadway.

In the late 90s, Bevis sank a lot of his own money into salvaging the Kalakala and bringing it from Alaska to Lake Union. As a result, he has been talking about selling the Foundry to pay debts associated with the rundown ferry since 2003.

After finally finding a buyer for the space in SoDo-based True Fabrications, Bevis said he is thinking about moving into an old fruit warehouse in Eastern Washington to concentrate on his sculptures.

“When I moved to Fremont, it really was an arts center. That’s pretty much been eroded away,” he said. “Now, it’s just a drinking town. And, don’t get me wrong, I do my fair share of drinking, but I don’t smash bottles all over the place and paint over other peoples’ walls.”

Two years ago, Bevis said some problem tenants moved into the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry, causing trouble and refusing to pay rent. He suspected them of being involved in drugs, but the police wouldn’t do anything. Those tenants scared off the rest of the Foundry’s occupants, he said.

“They basically collapsed the system,” Bevis said. “Just thinking about it gives me post-traumatic stress.”

Since finally getting rid of the problem tenants, Bevis has been alone in the 17,000-square-foot Foundry.

But, the building won’t be empty for long, as True Fabrications needs to vacate its current space by June and hopes to start renovating the Foundry as soon as possible.

True Fabrications’ owners – Ben Inadomi, Dhruv Agarwal and Nik Patel – will be using half the Foundry as office space for their business. They plan to turn the main area into a restaurant and house wine-tasting rooms, artist studios or other businesses in the rest of the space.

“I feel like that part of Fremont is just starting to wake up,” Agarwal said. “There’s a lot of potential there.”

The idea is to turn the area into a wine and food-tasting hub, adding the Foundry space to neighbors like Theo Chocolates, Brouwer’s Café, Mischief and Revel, he said.

But first, True Fabrications has a big construction job ahead of it, starting with building out office space for the fast-growing company, Inadomi said. Then, there is the challenge of remodeling a working foundry into something entirely different.

“It’s an amazing building,” Inadomi said. “It’s so unique.”

The main work space includes a smelting pit that can heat bronze to 4,000 degrees and a giant crane – not quite up to code for a restaurant. The building’s concrete structure is apparently so thick its second floor can bear the weight of a semi-truck.

In addition, Bevis accumulated tons of stuff in the space, Inadomi said. There is old-school machinery, a bronzed porcupine still stuck in its plaster because Bevis couldn’t figure out how to remove it without breaking the quills, animals killed in the Exxon Valdez oil spill that Bevis had bronzed, and a partially completed scale model of the Kalakala that Agarwal said they are hoping to finish and turn into a food truck.

(See inside the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry)

Inadomi and Agarwal said True Fabrications is hoping to work with Bevis and local restaurateurs to preserve the artsy feeling of the Foundry and keep it industrial, utilizing some of the machinery and the crane.

“We love the history of the Foundry,” Inadomi said. “We want to keep that part of it.”

While Bevis said he is too close to the subject to talk fairly about what Fremont is losing when the Foundry converts from an artists’ space to restaurant and office space, Agarwal said the conversion will be good for the neighborhood.

He said True Fabrications wants the building to be as public and accessible as possible.

“I’m really excited to see how it turns out,” Inadomi said.