The building at 124 N 35th Street spent nineteen years smelling like chocolate. Theo Chocolate ran its flagship out of that warehouse, tempering cacao a few blocks from the troll and the Lenin statue, until a merger with the American Licorice Company folded the Seattle operation and left the space empty. Now the same address holds ten pickleball courts, a pro shop, and a membership tier that runs $308 a month for a family of six. On Friday nights this month, that same warehouse floor doubled as a stop on Fremont Fridays, the neighborhood's free, community-run music series, hosting pop-up sets alongside its regular paddle traffic.
That is the whole story of Fremont this week, condensed into one lease.
Two Businesses, One Address
The Picklr Fremont opened this year in the 27,000-square-foot space, and the numbers tell you who it's built for. A junior membership for players 5 to 17 runs $74 a month. An adult unlimited membership is $141. The family plan, covering two adults and up to four kids, tops out at $308. Those are Seattle tech-salary prices for a sport that was invented on Bainbridge Island in 1965 largely as a way to keep bored kids occupied with plywood paddles and a wiffle ball.
Drew Brees is a co-owner of the parent franchise, which now runs about twenty clubs nationally. The Fremont location is the company's third in Washington, after Federal Way and Tacoma, and its owner has described the goal as building "Fremont's third space," somewhere that isn't home or work but still feels like the neighborhood's living room.
What makes the building worth writing about isn't the pickleball boom itself. It's that the same room hosting $141-a-month adult leagues also turned up in this season's Fremont Fridays lineup, the free 501(c)(3) series that's run every summer Friday since 2022 and hit its fifth season this year with pop-up programming at venues across the neighborhood, The Picklr included. Silent discos and paddle drills, sharing a floor plan.
This Week's Actual Calendar
Fremont doesn't usually compress this much into seven days, but the run-up to Oktoberfest does it every September. Here's what's actually on the calendar between now and the following Monday.
| Day | What's Happening | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday, Sept 13 | Fremont Sunday Market, the weekly flea and farmers market running since 1990 | Under the Fremont Bridge, 3401 Evanston Ave N |
| Friday, Sept 18 | Fremont Oktoberfest opens, 5 to 11 p.m., 21+ | Phinney Ave N & N 35th St |
| Saturday, Sept 19 | Oktoberfest day two, noon to 11 p.m., stein hoisting and a costume contest | Phinney Ave N & N 35th St |
| Sunday, Sept 20 | Oktoberfest closes, noon to 5 p.m., dogs welcome, Beer Mile Run at 1 p.m. | Phinney Ave N & N 35th St |
| Tuesday, Sept 22 | Fremont Neighborhood Council's monthly meeting | Doric Lodge #92, 619 N 36th St |
Fremont Oktoberfest has been running long enough that it's outlasted most of the businesses around it, and this year's edition sticks to the same footprint it's used for years, the intersection of Phinney and 35th. The festival pours upward of 80 craft beers, which sounds like a lot until you remember this is the neighborhood that also supports Fremont Brewing Company as a daily hangout rather than a special occasion.
The market that opens the week and the beer festival that closes it are both older than most of the people currently walking past The Picklr's front windows. That's not nostalgia talking. It's a scheduling fact.
The Raccoon Moved In Too
Fremont's other new attraction this year didn't come from a franchise or a chamber of commerce. It came from a raccoon.
When a short-spined, unusually shaped raccoon named Jimothy went viral out of Ballard this summer, the tribute art didn't stay in Ballard. A paved utility alley in lower Fremont now has its own sprawling mural of Jimothy, distinct from the original painted behind Ballard Clay, with flyers on nearby utility poles pointing visitors toward it under the neighborhood's long-running mantra: Stay Weird.
It's a small thing, an alley mural chasing an internet meme, but it's also exactly the kind of unpermitted, low-cost, resident-driven addition that Fremont has always specialized in. Nobody applied for a grant to paint that raccoon. Somebody just did it, the way somebody built the troll under the Aurora Bridge in 1990 to clean up what had been a dumping ground, and the way the Lenin statue ended up a few blocks from the glass offices of Google and Adobe without anyone planning it that way.
What the Building Is Actually Saying
The easy version of this story is "Old Fremont versus New Fremont," weird bohemian holdout against tech money and $25 sandwiches. That framing shows up in nearly every guide to the neighborhood written in the last two years, and it's not wrong exactly. It's just incomplete, because it assumes the two sides are competing for the same square footage.
They're not. They're sharing it.
The Picklr didn't demolish anything to move into 124 N 35th. It took over a warehouse that was already empty once Theo Chocolate's Seattle operations wound down, and it now hosts the same free community music series that also plays at Add-a-Ball, George & Dragon, and Mermaid Lounge. A subscription-based pickleball club and a free 21+ silent disco are using the same lighting rig on different nights. The raccoon mural didn't replace a Fremont Troll photo op, it just gave people one more reason to walk down an alley they'd otherwise ignore.
If you already live in Fremont, none of this requires a decision from you. You don't have to pick a side between the market under the bridge and the pickleball club two blocks away, because as of this month, they're both just things that are open on a given Sunday. The neighborhood's actual pattern in 2026 isn't replacement. It's stacking, one lease, one alley, one Friday night lineup at a time.
That's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who's watched a warehouse change hands and wondered what it means for the block. The answer, at least this year, is: probably one more thing to do, not one less.
If you're weighing what a shift like that means for your own property here, or you're curious what a home near this stretch of 35th Street is actually worth with Fremont's mix of old landmarks and new tenants factored in, Mark Ashmun can walk you through a free home valuation grounded in exactly this kind of neighborhood-level detail.
