Fremont is sometimes referred to as "The People's Republic of Fremont" or "The Artists' Republic of Fremont," and was at one time a center of counterculture; however, the neighborhood has become somewhat gentrified since the 1990s. It remains home to a controversial statue of Vladimir Lenin salvaged from Slovakia by an art lover from Washington state who was teaching in the area at the time. After the 1989 fall of the Communist government, he brought the statue to Fremont with money raised through a mortgage on his house. The "Fremont Troll" is an concrete sculpture of a troll crushing a Volkswagen Beetle in its left hand, created in 1990 and situated under the north end of the Aurora Bridge. The street running under the bridge and ending at the Troll was renamed Troll Avenue N. in 2005.