Barrel chested with a voice bigger than his 6-foot, 2-inch frame, it’s hard to miss Guy “Doc” Lafitte strolling the streets of Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.
The good doctor wears a long cream-colored linen jacket, pinstriped wool trousers and big black boots. Lafitte has a curled handlebar
moustache and one eye is covered by a black patch.
It’s a costume that fits his 19th-century persona.
The patch is real, he claims. The story: He lost his eye in a gun accident 15 years ago.
“I forgot my wedding anniversary,” he said.
Guy Lafitte is his real name, he says
. His doctorate also is genuine, but the degree is in history, not medicine. He carries a small leather doctor’s bag nonetheless.
While Lafitte would fit into modern Fremont, the eccentric area that hosts an annual solstice parade, naked bike ride and a zombie walk, he is acting a part for this new walking tour.
Visitors today find Lafitte and others like him on The Fremont Tour, best defined as one part art history, one part local lore and several more parts street theater.
For $18 a person, participants follow behind a pair of costumed tour guides who entertain, teach and pull pranks on their willing victims.
Paying customers are dressed in all sorts of outfits, treated to group hugs and sent on scavenger hunts. One person even gets to launch a rocket.
Tours begin in the outdoor garden of the History House, a kind of library-meets-community-center, blended with art exhibits. A piece of the Berlin Wall is on display, and there’s a miniature-golf hole that offers a preview of Fremont’s public sculptures.
To be sure, Fremont is funky, even if the neighborhood’s claim that it is the “Center of the Universe” is a bit overstated.
On my tour, Lafitte partnered with Bjorn Anders (Bjorn Whitney is his true identity), whose character is a grunge rocker recently resurrected from a cryogenic freeze. He fell into a beer cooler in the early ’90s and thawed out a decade later, he said.
Their banter is fun and much of it improvised.
With bags full of props in tow, the group wanders the neighborhood, stopping at about a half-dozen spots, mostly the public art erected on city sidewalks.
There is “Waiting for the Interurban” (a statue of six people and a dog waiting for the old street car that once ran from Seattle to Everett), a rocket, and a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin.
“He was always been my favorite Beatle,” Anders said.
The final stop is the Fremont Troll, the massive 1990 sculpture that lurks under the Aurora Bridge. Turns out that the troll’s lair was much more dangerous before he moved in. The nook under the bridge was an open-air market for illegal drugs. Installing one of Seattle’s best tourist attractions sent the drug denizens scurrying elsewhere.
That story of a creative solution to a neighborhood blight is retold throughout Fremont, a once-industrial area turned liberal, artsy and a bit, well, odd.
The tour fits right in.
The Fremont Tour is the brainchild of Edmonds businessman Mark Ukelson, 59. Ukelson used to own a warehouse business in Fremont and has been noodling with the idea of a guided tour for a long time.
“It took me 16 years to get my act together,” Ukelson said.
The tours have been operating since June 19 and are scheduled through Sept. 4 before hibernating for the winter.
Ukelson wrote a script, hired actors who can improvise, and insists that while the tours may be playful, they’re timely.
That means arrive on time and bring a big helping of good humor.
The other day, plenty of people peppered guides Lafitte and Anders with questions about Fremont, the artwork, and about their gags, magic tricks and outfits.
Lafitte said he’d do his best to respond. With a tip of his broad-rimmed hat and a twinkle gleaming from his one eye, he quipped, “If we don’t know the answer, we’ll make it up.”
Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3447; jholtz@heraldnet.com.
The Fremont Tour
Tours are scheduled at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Sept. 4.
Tickets cost $18 for adults, $15 for seniors and students. Kids under 10 and seniors over 99 are free. Reserve a spot, purchase tickets or find more information at www.thefremonttour.com.
The tour leaves from The History House, 790 N. 34th St., Seattle.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
